Advocates of this practice argue that some studies have shown it to be safe and capable of replicating the benefits of breastfeeding. Such studies are difficult to trust: male breastfeeding is so rare that the available evidence remains largely anecdotal, with no reliable long-term data available.

In any case, do we really need studies to conclude that feeding babies a human byproduct obtained through hormonal overstimulation is unhealthy?

At a time when the trend toward positive parenting and organic food is booming, when it is considered good practice for parents to cook unprocessed meals at home for their little ones, a government sees no problem with encouraging a practice based solely on chemical manipulation – light-years removed from natural processes – without anyone even considering applying common sense or the precautionary principle to the matter.

When the Child Becomes an Afterthought

But there is something even more serious. It is as if the person most directly affected – namely, the child who is to receive this “chest juice”, as feminist activist Diana Alastair describes it with biting irony – were not even a factor in the experiment. What’s in it for the child? No one seems to care, since the most important thing is to satisfy the thwarted desire of adults seeking an intense experience.

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Alastair does not hesitate to question the underlying motives of these biological men who, at all costs, seek to breastfeed – not their own child, but a child they most likely obtained through surrogacy or adoption: one might legitimately wonder whether a dark sexual fantasy is lurking behind this.

The organization For Women Scotland, which has distinguished itself with several victories in the battle against transactivism and has received funding from author J.K. Rowling specifically for this work, has sounded the alarm: taxpayers would be “sickened” that their money was being used to fund the promotion of a “creepy and highly disturbing practice”.

Susan Smith, a director of For Women Scotland, insists: “To state the obvious, biological men cannot breastfeed babies. Whatever hormone-induced gloop their bodies might be chemically engineered to produce, it is not human milk.”

A Good Practice, Really?

In 2024, University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust stated that milk produced by transgender women was “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby”. But what does “comparable” mean in this context?

The practice promoted by Edinburgh’s Queer Milk – itself a member of the Queer Milk Collective – blithely tramples on all the scientific knowledge accumulated over the years by organizations such as La Leche League (LLL), which have done so much to help us understand the mysterious mechanisms of breastfeeding and the entire system of ongoing emotional and biological exchanges it facilitates between mother and child.

Breast milk possesses remarkable properties, including the ability to adapt to the baby’s changing nutritional needs and health status and to pass on antibodies that protect the baby against infections.

Encouraging biological men to produce milk reduces breastfeeding to an industrial-style technical and chemical process. Today, LLL is also under pressure from transgender activists and has adapted its language, stating that it supports everyone who wants to breastfeed, “chestfeed” or “human milk feed”, regardless of sex or “gender identity”: this is what prompted its founder, the Irishwoman Marian Tompson, to resign from the organization in 2024 after 68 years of dedication to the cause.

MP Rosie Duffield is rightly concerned that infants are being relegated to the status of “guinea pigs for the lifestyle choices of others” and likens these actions to “medical experiments conducted on babies”.

The budget of the LGBT Health and Wellbeing association for 2024–2025 showed revenue of £1.15m (€1.34m or $1.55m), with less than £38,000 (€44,343 or $51,240) coming from private donations. The bulk of the funding comes from the government, the NHS or local public institutions such as the Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership and the Edinburgh Integration Joint Board.

This organization’s case is not an isolated one. In France, the activist group OUTRANS has just published a brochure dedicated to “trans parenting”, which proudly asserts that a trans person “can breastfeed”. The organization states that it has a partnership with the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, receives public funding as a result and conducts authorized outreach in schools.