Scotland’s grotesque male-breastfeeding experiment – spiked

There were once moral red lines. Children were not to be used to gratify adult desires, and the state certainly wasn’t supposed to facilitate such behaviour. In today’s Scotland, those lines have been erased. LGBT Health and Wellbeing – which receives hundreds of thousands of pounds per year from the Scottish government, the NHS and local councils – runs weekly Edinburgh support sessions where men are encouraged to give ‘human milk to their babies’.

Called ‘Queer Milk’, the group welcomes LGBTQ+ parents ‘breastfeeding, chestfeeding or giving human milk to their baby in any amount… no matter what your feeding journey looks like’.

Let’s be clear: men cannot breastfeed. Some can, after extensive hormone treatment, produce a small amount of fluid. As Susan Smith, director of For Women Scotland, told The Times: ‘Whatever hormone-induced gloop their bodies might be chemically engineered to produce, it is not human milk.’

Even setting aside the obvious medical questions about feeding babies hormone-induced secretions, a more fundamental question remains: why do some men want to breastfeed at all?

Readers of a delicate disposition may wish to stop reading now, because what I’m about to explain is grim. Some men have a keen sexual interest in the functions of women’s bodies, and many who identify as transwomen become aroused by everything from menstruation to the menopause. At the time of writing, on a major porn site accessible in the UK, there are 48,163 videos tagged ‘lactating tits’, and some of the most popular within that genre involve men leaking liquid from their nipples. The male performers in these videos have artificially enlarged their moobs with hormones or the use of breast pumps. What they do not possess is the female breast anatomy and physiology designed to nourish an infant.

Yet claims of male breastfeeding are nothing new. Nearly a decade ago, a man called Dana Fried wrote in the Stranger that a ‘queer lactation consultant’ had given him drugs in the week before his partner gave birth. He reflected: ‘When my baby attached to my breast, there was an incredible chemical cascade that ran through my entire body like lightning. Imagine the most electric thing a partner has ever done to you, then multiply it by 10.’ He then added: ‘And yeah, I kind of got off on it. Don’t judge.’

For years, this fetish remained the preserve of creeps online. Now it is steadily being sanitised by mainstream institutions. Breastfeeding organisations increasingly speak of ‘chestfeeding’, ‘bodyfeeding’, ‘feeding parents’ and ‘human milk’. This is to avoid excluding men who identify as mothers or women who are apparently triggered by words such as ‘breast’ but not by giving birth.

The ideological capture of infant feeding has already claimed some of the profession’s most respected voices. The desexing of breastfeeding proved so divisive that it tore apart La Leche League GB, one of Britain’s best-known breastfeeding charities. Long-serving trustee Miriam Main resigned after the organisation adopted transgender-inclusive policies, saying she refused to help biological men ‘perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding’, which she said put babies’ safety at risk. Meanwhile, Marian Tompson, one of the charity’s founders, walked away from the international movement she had helped build, warning: ‘This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.’ In Australia, former Australian Breastfeeding Association counsellor Jasmine Sussex now faces legal proceedings simply for stating that men cannot breastfeed. The message to professionals is unmistakable: affirm men’s identities or risk your reputation and livelihood.

Sometimes the narcissism of trans activists can be bloody funny; the wails of indignation when a 6’3” rugby player in a frock is misgendered, the mad fantasies about bonding over swapping lippy in the ladies’ loo, or hyperbolic claims of genocide despite a conspicuous lack of corpses. It is easy to laugh when the fantasy harms only the dignity of the adults involved. But when children are co-opted into these often deeply sexualised fantasies, there is no comedy angle.

Today, behaviour that would once have prompted safeguarding concerns is not merely tolerated but actively promoted, while those who object are denounced as extremists. We have come to the point where the Scottish government and public bodies are supporting what amounts to a grotesque experiment on babies, in order to validate the identities and feelings of adult men. The red lines have not vanished overnight –; they have been rubbed out deliberately, one linguistic concession, one rewritten policy and one hefty donation at a time.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.