On Tuesday I wrote a post that has since had 20 thousand views and caused a bit of a storm. The post was a response to a BBC News item on Monday night in which the presenter Rajini Vaidyanathan claimed that, according to the NHS, the World Health Organisation (WHO), and numerous studies, ‘transgender women’s milk is just as good for babies as breastmilk’. Vaidyanathan’s guest, a woman completely unqualified in the area of breastfeeding, Kate Luxion, not only supported this claim but built on it, stating that male ‘milk’ was not just equivalent to, but potentially of ‘higher quality’, than women’s.
To summarise my findings:
- All of the news coverage came from one letter written by an NHS medical director, now no longer in post.
- Nowhere has it been stated that this letter represents the position of the NHS itself.
- The WHO guidance that the letter refers to concerns the benefits of women breastfeeding over formula milk and is not about induced lactation.
- The letter refers to five academic studies that support induced lactation but four out of five of these studies are on females.
- The BBC referred to ‘one case found what it called no observable effects in babies fed by induced lactation’. This study was in fact into the effects of a female person taking testosterone whilst breastfeeding.
- The one study in the NHS letter that was into male ‘milk’ was a case study of a single male. (more on this in a moment)
- This was the same study that Kate Luxion suggested showed male milk was of ‘higher quality’. In fact, that study found the male ‘milk’ to have a higher fat content. This is not an indicator of quality.
But in spite of the huge numbers of people who have been reading and sharing my piece, the misinformation at the heart of the story has continued to be spread globally.
An article in ‘Futurism’, who I hoped might be a niche bunch but who in fact have 1.2 million instagram followers, went with:
As averse as I am to conspiracy theories, it’s been tempting at times to wonder if this misinformation is intentional. Why would the state broadcaster effectively rubber stamp this story, allowing false claims that males can breastfeed to be spread far and wide?
It is disheartening that no media outlet including the BBC has seen fit to correct this story, which is truly ‘fake news’.
This contention – as to ‘men’s milk’ – shows a complete and utter disregard for the health and wellbeing of babies and their right to develop in the positive way babies develop when fed by breast milk (or, if for physical or physiological reasons the mother cannot breastfeed, the baby as part of the child-mother duo is bottle-fed by the mother bringing her longstanding 9 month connection with the developing child into that mother-child relationship). Privileging male notions of their ‘right’ to pretend to be mothers, pretend to breastfeed (whatever they wish to call it), pretend to do what women do or can do or are or can be, in the way that the interview and references (sic) commented upon indicates is to deny the rights of babies and the children they have a right to grow up to be. On this nonsense of males being able to breastfeed babies, read Isadora Sanger’s Born in the Right Body … https://www.awesomebooks.com/book/9798364867902/born-in-the-right-body