Inducing Magical Thinking

Welcoming men into birth and breastfeeding support groups is virtue signaling, and detrimental to women, not empowering

At least this dad didn’t claim to be a woman. Photo courtesy of Maxamillian Kendall Neubauer

Imagine your excitement; you and your partner have wanted to start a family for over 10 years. You began this journey as most couples do, by having unprotected sex. That didn’t work, and medical testing showed that it might never end with an actual baby, so you start to explore other avenues for creating your family. You read about surrogacy, but this is not for you and your partner because the ethical problems are insurmountable.

You know that adoption or fostering is something you can open your hearts to. You apply to an agency and are placed with a six month old baby who has been tragically removed from the care of his mother because of neglect due to intractable serious substance use.

Your best friend asks you if you plan to breastfeed your baby, and you are surprised because you have observed that breastfeeding follows birth for your friends, but you have never even been pregnant! Your body is not preparing for an upcoming birth, even if your mind is fully engaged in the process. You read this link, and realize that breastfeeding could work for you and your new baby too; how exciting is that?

Because you are the last in your friend group to become parents, you have watched all your friends breastfeed their babies and seen the intimacy that the breastfeeding relationship fosters. You decide to do everything you can to do this too, especially after reading that breastfeeding can help a traumatized child attach to a replacement mother.

You go along to a meeting of your local La Leche League group and while all the women there are welcoming and friendly, most of the discussion is not very useful for someone in your position who is inducing lactation without having had a baby. The Leader recommends you join the La Leche League International Facebook group for induced lactation/relactation, which you eagerly do.

Until you read a post from Sara and realize that the welfare of babies is not a motivating factor for everyone on this forum, and in fact, that not every “woman” in the group is a woman at all; some of the posters are men.

This is not a woman on testosterone, but a man on estrogen.

This should not have come as a total surprise as this is a private group where ’wokely’ correct questions must be answered to gain access. The group rules include this statement: “Please be aware that group members and lactating parents are not all women or mothers.” Which I would like to point out does not automatically lead one to consider that male people are going to be needing help to induce lactation, given the prominence of a few women vociferously calling themselves “dads”.

I did have a small chuckle at this one: “Please do not debate controversial/off topic things.” It takes a real leap of imagination to consider fetishistic men as “controversial” in my world, but clearly this is no longer a given, at least in breastfeeding support circles. But even I was surprised when putting “breastfeeding support groups for men” into Google brought up La Leche League International (LLLI) as the very first entry.

No wonder her fellow Board members refused to honestly discuss with Founder Marian Tompson her queries about whether they supported men breastfeeding. If “trans women are women”, then I guess the answer is “no”? Which kind of leads trans men (actual women who can still get pregnant) out of the loop does it not? Isn’t it funny how if you change the meaning of words, you are compelled to also change your actions.

Is La Leche League International promoting pedophilia?

Returning briefly to Sara Ferah and his breasts (because that’s why he was in this group), even a quick jog through the internet would have brought to life not only his menstruation fetish (a very long post that included a photo about how he created his own personal version of “menstrual blood” from his genitals using a lancet, because of course he doesn’t actually have a uterus which menstruates in any fashion at all), his pursuit of “nullification” that involved the removal of his “reproductive organs” and his forays into the work of “death doulas”.

What is wrong with women who support men invading groups for designed to support women who have had to deal with baby loss?

I am not one to rain on anyone’s parade, but I also don’t think that men with multiple fetishes including lactophilia (an erotic interest in lactating breasts and breast milk) should be given access to groups formed to provide mother to mother support for the normal, natural, sexed function of breastfeeding. There are many porn sites that specialize in this; if you want to find highly sexualized videos that involve lactating breasts you will be spoiled for choice. (Believe me, I know because I looked.)

Here’s another delusional man (who is an actual father):

Wearing Minnie Mouse ears does not make you a woman.

Here’s a man who wants the full-service ride with women’s support. Calling himself the “Princess Mom”, he joined a support group for mothers to support him through his simulated pregnancy and labor (because even he realized that however he engineered his “labor”, no baby was going to present itself), which ended with (what else?) his plea to borrow a baby to breastfeed. He also joined a breastfeeding support group called Support for Mothers on Domperidone where literally hundreds of posts supported him in his (simulated) pregnancy “journey”. One woman who was clearly not on board his gender woo train wrote:

As someone who has experienced multiple miscarriages, and years of infertility, I am stunned to hear that you think this experience is preparing you fur a comparable experience. I never knew that my pregnancies were going to end in death, and I certainly wasn't able to prepare myself mentally tor the deaths of my children. That pain is indescribable and cannot be simulated. I truly feel like you’re trivializing the gravity of that scenario. It is the actual death of a child. Death.

Gabrielle wrote a response which basically boiled down to “sorry if your feelings were hurt, but I’m suffering too” and ended this by stating:

l am not here to compare or trivialize. I hope you understand and can sympathize where I am coming from.

Then of course the woman who had suffered real baby losses, as opposed to the self-manufactured, pretend sort of “loss” was told off by several posters, one of whom told her:

[I} agree with Emily. I too have lost a baby, but these are our stories, not Gabrielle's. She (sic) is trying to heal her (sic) dysphoria. Please be sensitive to that. If you don't like it, keep scrolling.

In what universe are an adult male living his fetish and baby loss to women equated to be on an equal footing?

He also expressed a wish to lactate for the purposes of donating his milk. What a hero. Oh, and no shortage of helpful ideas of what he could do with his lacteous bounty, especially if no milk banks were willing to chance her generous gift (sic).

When an actual woman protested about his inclusion in this group, SHE was removed and prevented from participating. Here he is in his own words, explaining why his narcissism should be catered to by the entire world (one reason: he was jealous of his wife).

However, another woman mused about offering him her five-month-old baby to satisfy his breastfeeding fetish.

What the hell is wrong with her? What is wrong with all these women who “like”, “love” and “care” about autogynephilic (AGP) men who get their jollies off of babies breastfeeding? Like this man who masturbated while watching his ex-wife breastfeed their baby.

She might have been married to this guy who is another man who gets off by characterizing himself as a milk producing cow. In this video he states that his baby is “in the works now” and “it’s very biologically confirming” that his ability to lactate makes him a mother.

References vary, but it appears that quite a few men have sexual kinks that can overlap each other, which leads me to wonder if there are any links between farmyard (a subset of bestiality) and lactation fetishes?

And another question; women who experience any sort of erotic feelings while engaged in the act of breastfeeding usually feel deeply ashamed and guilty. (For no reason actually as this is a normal and expected side effect of oxytocin release.) But AGP men revel in this which appears to be socially acceptable and in fact, this is one reason why they want to breastfeed in the first place.

This man also wanted to be able to breastfeed when his wife became pregnant and worked to achieve this goal:

Having breasts was great, but using them to feed another human being? That was magic. Specifically, it was mom magic. I might have been my daughter's sperm donor, but breastfeeding was how I knew I was going to be a mom. It validated my womanhood as much as any surgery ever could. (Emphasis in original)

He never mentions his wife except tangentially and he never refers to her as a mother. He does say that he got sick the week before an induction that ended in a cesarean section and within six weeks of them both struggling to breastfeed, they gave up and just formula fed. Which rather begs the question: if he had put as much effort into supporting his wife to do what her body was programmed to do (and his wasn’t), might the outcome have been more positive for their baby?

And he also knows what he was doing because when he talks about the “electric feeling” of a baby suckling he adds: (And yeah, I kind of got off on it. Don't judge.)

Why has the word “no” disappeared from public discourse?

Well sorry, but I do judge, and I wonder with amazement at all the women who don’t. Because those of you who remain in “be kind” land who support “everyone” to “human milk” feed babies are ignoring the human rights of babies to not be used as props in the kinky sex games of men.

That men breastfeeding is even considered a topic for further research is pandering to a flawed ideology that claims that as no facts exist, everything is a social construct. The falsity of believing this is vested in the very existence of babies, whose future as one of only two sexes is made immutable at the moment of fertilization. If this were not true, then why is there not a single fertility clinic on the planet that uses “mix and match” gametes to create new babies and mandates that these embryos can only be gestated in adult human females?

Mammalian evolution has designed a system that largely works and that depends on a sexual division for functional reproduction. That is one reason why interfering with normal puberty leads to sterility for both sexes; it is a biological protection that prevents flawed specimens from being created.

Trans = self-centered

I wrote here about the utter selfishness of trans men who become mothers and feel that experimenting on their own babies is acceptable in the service of preserving their own mental health (rather than just forgoing pregnancy the way that real men do), but clearly delusional women do not have a monopoly on celebrating harms to babies either.

Pregnant “Dads” Are the Center of Their Own Universe

It is one thing for individuals to act in what they think is their own best interests, regardless of any collateral harms to others (including helpless babies), but it is another thing altogether to have previously esteemed organizations such as LLLI cater to the pornographic fantasies of men by allowing them access to groups where the assumption would be that only other women would be there.

The LLLI Board maintains that they “don’t take a stand on male lactation”, even though instructions for men who want to induce lactation and breastfeed are easily accessed on the public LLL website. I suspect that NOT giving instructions to men about how they can disrupt the mother/baby dyad was never considered by the seven Founders as a topic they needed to address.

I am only sorry that today’s Board feels differently.