The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new transgender-themed guidance on biological men and “chestfeeding” infant babies has roused the wrath of mothers across the nation, many of whom are well acquainted with the vulnerability, intricacies, and intimacy of breastfeeding their children.
“Transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed),” the CDC says in guidance on feeding infants. “The gender identity or expression of transgender individuals is different from their sex at birth. The gender identity of nonbinary-gendered individuals does not fit neatly into either man or woman.”
The CDC also refers readers to the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine protocol that breaks down how biological men who identify as transgender women and have had “breast augmentation” (the addition of faux breasts) can “chestfeed” an infant baby.
“We are prioritizing the emotional wants of adult males over the safety of infants,” commentator and author Bethany Mandel told The Daily Signal. “I’ve breastfed six kids—I’ve basically been nursing for a decade. You have to be careful about what kinds of medications you’re taking in.”
“There is no chance that the substance emitted by a male whose body was tricked into lactation is safe, and of course there is no nutritional value to the child,” she added. “This is about prioritizing the adult, not the child.”
Mary Rice Hasson, director of the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, also emphasized to The Daily Signal that “a mother (female!) breastfeeds because it’s good for her baby.”
“A male performing a pseudo-breastfeeding sexual fetish is callously indifferent to the baby’s needs,” she added. “This is perverted, abusive behavior. Any medical provider who facilitates such behavior is complicit in child abuse.”
Can biological men actually feed a baby through “chestfeeding”? Transgender activists say yes.
Two pro-transgender doctors claim that a man was able to produce enough of some sort of nipple discharge to sustain a baby for six weeks by “implementing a regimen of domperidone, estradiol, progesterone, and breast pumping,” according to a 2018 case report on “induced lactation.”
The Food and Drug Administration warned pregnant women in 2004 not to use domperidone to increase milk production due to safety concerns: “Because of the possibility of serious adverse effects, FDA recommends that breastfeeding women not use domperidone to increase milk production.”
It’s unclear what concoction of hormones or nutrients that nipple discharge actually contained, or what effect it had on the child’s development. The case report makes no mention of where the baby, which the biological man had presumably adopted, came from. The pro-transgender doctors, Tamar Reisman and Zil Goldstein, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
Many of the women that The Daily Signal spoke with pointed out how very careful the medical community is with pregnant mothers who are biological females, warning these moms not to eat deli meat, certain kinds of cheeses, vegetables, milk, and not to drink certain juices, caffeine, and alcohol.
Meg Kilgannon, mother to four and a senior fellow for education studies at Family Research Council, accused activists of “sexualizing a beautiful, natural, frustrating, difficult, self-sacrificial act like nursing a baby.”
“This ideology abuses people at all ages including and especially children,” she added. “We have lost the plot as a society when we even entertain this conversation.”
Writer Emily Daniels, mother to two children with a baby on the way, told The Daily Signal that the conversation made her nauseous: “For men to satisfy their desire to have their nipples sucked on by infants, whether seriously perverted or seriously misguided from mental illness, we have to pretend that whatever Rx-fueled nipple discharge they can secrete will actually nourish a baby?”
These women are not the only ones who suggest that biological men attempting to breastfeed babies stems from sexual impulses.
“BIRTH is not a fetish,” insisted Twitter user Wildfire Whispers in a now viral tweet.
Swimmer Riley Gaines, an advocate for keeping biological men out of women’s spaces, slammed a trans-identifying biological man for posting photos of himself with a baby pressed against his fake breasts.
“This can only be described as sexual abuse of a child,” Gaines said. The former swimmer pointed out that Mika Minio-Paluello, the trans-identifying man, had posted photos in which he was wearing nipple clamps.
“How can someone look at this man and not immediately think he needs to be in prison for sexual abuse of an infant?” she asked. “The smirk on his face says it all.”
The CDC did not return requests for comment for this story, specifically on what health risks may be in store for babies who consume a biological male’s nipple secretion.
“The CDC has a responsibility to talk about the health risks, but they have been derelict in doing that,” Dr. Jane Orient told The Daily Mail. “We have no idea what the long-term effects on the child will be” if the trans-identifying man or woman is using “all kinds of off-label hormones.”
New York-based internal medicine physician Dr. Stuart Fischer told the publication that it is “very hard to believe” that a biologically female mother’s breast milk equates to that of a biological man. “If it’s been tested a handful of times, how would we know the long-range effect?” he asked. “The short-term is one thing, but the long-term in terms of physical and mental illness … “
“It’s an emerging field, to put it mildly,” he added.
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