Mick Hartley

The Queer Birth Club that provides training sessions for NHS midwives…Joan Smith at UnHerd has some questions, like Why is the NHS running male breastfeeding workshops?

How could the NHS be so gullible? How could midwives, of all people, fall for this nonsense? Their prime responsibility is to women and children, yet it’s striking that infants barely feature on the club’s pastel-themed website, which claims to be “amplifying the voices of the often overlooked and invisible minorities in the birthing world”. The most invisible minority in its pitch, however, is babies.

That’s because male breastfeeding is an adult predilection, in which infants are co-opted to affirm the lie that men can become women. It’s a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist, evidenced by the fact that human beings were born and breastfed by women for thousands of years. No one suggested that men being unable to produce breast milk was an issue until about a decade ago, when the demands of trans-identified males began to distort just about every aspect of human life.

Babies’ health appears to be a non-existent consideration when a man wants to preen about his ability to breastfeed, even though he can only do it by taking an anti-nausea drug called domperidone. It is not approved to encourage lactation anywhere in the world, and the US Food and Drug Administration warns that it “is excreted in breast milk and could expose a breastfeeding infant to unknown risks”.

The NHS is in the middle of a financial crisis, leaving patients stuck on waiting lists for months if not years. The Queer Birth Club’s workshops are not free: it offers “tiered pricing for anybody working in the NHS, members of the LGBTQ+ community, those from historically excluded communities and more”. Health Secretary Wes Streeting needs to ask urgent questions about whether the NHS is funding participation in what is effectively “queer” propaganda — and whether health professionals are encouraging “off-label” prescriptions of lactation-inducing drugs as a result.

Politicians have become so used to appeasing the trans lobby that they rarely ask how trans women can simultaneously be the most oppressed demographic and one that gets everything it wants. But using newborn infants to satisfy a male fetish is surely a line that should not be crossed.