What's Behind the War on Breast Milk?
The claim transwomen can produce a liquid comparable to breast milk reveals the way bad science gets amplified by a biased media and an LGBTQ+ lobby that holds women's biology in contempt.
Some stories are so idiotic you dismiss them with an eye roll and wait for everyone else to do the same. That was my reaction to the story that an NHS Trust had argued the seepage from the nipples of some transwomen was comparable to the breast milk produced by mothers.
Yet somehow the eye rolls were not forthcoming. Or not from the mainstream media anyway. Instead this absurd claim went viral …globally.
The story began when a letter was leaked from the University of Sussex Hospitals Trust’s Medical Director, Dr Rachael Webb. Last year she wrote to a campaign group ‘Children of Transitioners’ who had complained about guidelines she’d circulated in 2021 with the ominous title ‘Perinatal Care for Trans and Non-Binary People’. Every time I see the word non-binary I hear the music from the Twilight Zone.
Dr Webb’s original 2021 guidelines argued that transwomen’s …er….milk was safe and nutritious. It did not however mention that there have been no long term studies into the safety of a baby being fed by a man taking high doses of cross-sex hormones. Indeed when she sent out her guidelines there had been only one study into the whole phenomenon. Published in 2018 this paper reported on just one case. Yes, that’s right : only one trans identified male. I kid you not. This sort of miniscule sample size will become a feature of this story.
The crucial thing to know about this one study other than the fact it was pumped out by the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York (no comment) was that although it said it was about safety, it actually wasn’t.
In fact it had nothing to do with testing whether so-called trans milk/liquid was safe for a baby to take. It was entirely focused on an experimental drug regime designed to see how much "milk” one lonely trans identified male with his leaky-weaky nipples could produce. The study (if that’s what we can call it) was published in the medical journal Transgender Health, which I’m sure we can all agree is bound to be a shining example of robust peer review.