La Leche League International is “a great enemy of the truth”

This is where you end up if you are in the gender ideology cult

La Leche League (LLL) until recently was touted as “the foremost global authority on breastfeeding”, but in no way could the current administration be taken seriously if they repeated this claim.

Why do I say that? Because they have changed their policies to include “everyone who wants to human milk feed” babies. This despite the Mission Statement that has guided volunteer Leaders since its inception in 1956 and remains the official statement:

“Our Mission is to help mothers worldwide to breastfeed through mother-to-mother support, encouragement, information, and education, and to promote a better understanding of breastfeeding as an important element in the healthy development of the baby and mother.”
(May 89; rev Apr 93)

It is important to note that all the LLL entities everywhere are legally constituted as charities within their respective countries, so their policies are subject to ongoing scrutiny if they are perceived as violating their commitments to charity rules and regulations.

Leaders (who are all biological females who have given birth and breastfed at least one baby for at least 12 months) are all volunteers and are required to pay a fee/subscription/dues to their respective Direct Connect Entities (DCE), each of which serves as the leadership body for its Leaders to connect with LLLI.

These are:

· LLL Canada

· European Area Network (EAN)

· LLL Great Britain (LLLGB)

· International Area Network (IAN)

· Ligue La Leche

· LLL New Zealand

· LLL USA

· LLL Alliance for Breastfeeding Education (also based in the USA)

By paying their yearly fee and ticking a box, Leaders are agreeing to abide by all LLLI policies, which include this one:

“LLLI is committed to serving everyone inclusive of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, physical or mental ability, socio-economic status, political views, gender identity, sexual orientation, family structure, or other protected status.”

One does not require an advanced degree in any of the health sciences to realize that not “everyone” has the capacity or capability to breastfeed a baby (which I am assuming they mean by “serving” as there is no mention of breastfeeding in this policy).

There is no such thing as a “lactating family”

I don’t know about you, but when I was breastfeeding my children, I was the only one doing any lactating in our family. It never occurred to me to ask, but I’m certain that if I had made a request for another family member to take over the night shift occasionally, it would not have been physiologically possible for another family member to replace me in breastfeeding my babies.

But of course, this is what you get when, instead of following your own Mission Statement, you choose to go down the dead-end road of gender ideology. Despite the twin facts that every person on the planet now and in the past emerged from the body of a natal woman and the only bodies who automatically morph physiologically into lactation are those same women who gave birth, LLL has joined the legions of others who bend the knee to those who believe that synthetic sex identities are just as valid as reality. (How one can only live their “authentic life” is after they endure mutilating medical procedures remains a mystery to me.)

Deliberately blurring the line between sex and gender is right out of the trans agenda playbook, but this is not bamboozling every Leader who is in the room with actual mothers and their very real (not virtual) babies trying to support them to breastfeed.

“No debate”, LLL style

It would be more than fair to state that many, in fact a clear majority of Leaders are not aligned with living up a unicorn’s backside, including a minority of those on the LLLI Board. I have been sent copies of many letters to the Board from Leaders who are not happy with using “a variety of terms” in place of “mothers”, who have questioned the need to support “everyone” and who feel totally out of their depth by being asked to work with men who want to disrupt the mother/baby dyad to “affirm” their “womanhood” or women who in are denial about their biological status and have had their breasts removed so have no way to feed their babies from their “bodies”.

If I ever decide to write about gaslighting, I will have so much material to work with, much of it from letters from the LLLI Board in response to Leaders who are asking questions.

Legitimate concerns are ignored or shut down with rhetoric that sounds like it has been written by Stonewall or some other group that promotes transgenderism. Bearded women having babies are not “seahorse dads”, they are confused and delusional women because only females can get pregnant and give birth, despite some being duped into believing otherwise. Similarly to every other cult, any degree of rational thought has vanished in the wake of a delusional belief system that posits that some women have penises and not all people who have babies are women.

Additionally, it is obvious to many that the entire issue of transgenderism is a manifestation of the most incredible privilege of our modern era. Far more women have the daily concern of keeping themselves and their children alive for one more day than have the luxury of debating whether you can decide which sex or gender you want to be seen as. This is a choice that only the self-indulgent can wallow in.

The LLLGB 6

La Leche League Great Britain is governed by a Council of Directors (volunteer trustees), elected from the body of LLLGB Leaders. Leaders worked hard prior to the last electoral cycle in November 2023 to legitimately be elected to their CoD. All Council members are Leaders in good standing (so are all women and mothers as this is a prerequisite for leadership).

The glitter poop brigade wasn’t having any of this turn about that put them into the minority position and about 14 of the 240 Leaders (roughly ~6%) have written to the LLLI Board, complaining that the newly elected CoD “were trying to turn LLLGB into a single sex organisation”, which of course might have had some merit if one deliberately conflates gender identity with sex.

Everyone who lives in the real world and not some fantasy island knows that only the female sex has the ability to have babies and to feed them from their breasts and that identity is irrelevant in biological processes. But as is the LLLI Board modus operandi, they chose to ignore this because when the six newly elected Leaders failed to collapse in acquiescence and fall into line, they were immediately suspended and removed from all LLLGB social media outlets.

This action breached LLLI policies and procedures, which is ironic considering that this is what these six women who volunteer their time as Trustees are accused of doing.

Welcome to a hall of mirrors…

After a promising start by LLLI: “The words ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ in our policies have not been defined”, next came a request for clarification from one of the six sanctioned Leaders:

So that there can be no misunderstanding, when I use the word mother I am using it in the sense that it is used in law in the UK to refer to a female in the biological sense. When I refer to women in these discussions I am referring to females however they identify. When I refer to men in these discussions I am referring to males however they identify. It is not possible to talk about these substantive issues unless we are clear about language. I hope we can agree that organising services across a population is different from when communicating with or about an individual, which would mean understanding that person's specific and particular needs, and that would of course require a personal, tailored approach.

But of course, the last thing that LLLI wants to be clear about is language because this has been the method to the madness of the last few years and how they have stealthily managed to shoehorn in policies that mean that Leaders have to pretend that reality doesn’t matter.

Confirming this, the LLLI Board goes on to say:

“Nevertheless, this does not mean that LLL is an organisation aimed at supporting only women. LLL provides information, resources, and support to all nursing parents, regardless of their gender identity.”

To which this clarifying statement was made by the Leaders from GB:

Gender identity is not the issue. Sex is the issue. I did not dispute that LLL should support all women regardless of gender identity. I raised a query about expanding our core services to include both sexes.

Some other never addressed points raised by these GB Leaders to the LLLI Board were (emphasis in originals):

The question is, does LLLI seek to redefine our core mission and beneficiaries to include males?

At present several of our trustees are interpreting LLLI policy to assert that Leaders will be obliged to assist males to lactate. Is this the correct interpretation of policy in LLLI’s view?

How does LLLI suggest this [supporting mothers to breastfeed] can be accomplished if the default becomes mixed sex? Is this in fact what LLLI is suggesting at all?

Are you using ‘mother’ as a gendered term or a sexed one? In other words, do you mean anyone who identifies as a mother, or anyone who is in fact a mother regardless of identity?

The question is does LLLI propose that the core mission [supporting mothers to breastfeed] should be changed?

This seems to suggest that LLLI expects Leaders to continue to hold single sex meetings at times that are “appropriate”. How does LLLI propose that this is done lawfully if we include men as core beneficiaries?

In any case, even if it were possible to know how a particular male identifies, if LLL abandons its core mother-baby mission and becomes a mixed sex service, how could we lawfully exclude any male?

LLLI: a classic example of a straw man argument

A straw man argument is when someone sets up and then disputes an assertion that is not actually being made. For example the assertion included multiple times in correspondence from the LLLI Board that the “dissident” Leaders of LLLGB were guilty of:  “moving the organization (LLLGB) towards being a single-sexed organization, excluding from support any people who are not women who have birthed their own babies, and breaching policies that require Leaders to treat others with respect for their identities and maintain LLL forums as a safe place for all.”

I and many others would point out that rather than “moving towards being a single-sexed organization"; most would argue that LLL already is and always has been a single-sexed organisation by virtue of the fact that only one sex is evolutionarily equipped to breastfeed her young.  

According to the LLLI bylaws Article II, section 3: "The purpose of La Leche League is

· To help mothers learn to breastfeed their babies;

· To encourage mothering through breastfeeding;

· To promote a better understanding of breastfeeding and related subjects.

It is not LLLI's purpose to "treat others with respect for their identities". LLLI is a breastfeeding organization not a human rights one. What does "treat others with respect" and "a safe place" mean anyway? How does it serve the interests of women and their babies to prioritize gender over sex?

How is it “inclusive” to deliberately exclude Leaders who all signed up to the Mission Statement, but who are not willing to violate their strongly held beliefs that only natal women should be breastfeeding? Why is this not considered to be a disrespectful slap in the face, not only for them, but for every woman who has ever been a mother?

Equally, many women are religiously prohibited from engaging with men they are not related to or just feel uncomfortable baring their breasts or discussing intimate body functions in front of men. Where is the LLLI “inclusion” for them?

Part of the current problem is the lack of transparency and openness on the part of those Leaders who have hitched their wagons to the genderbread person at the expense of women and their babies. LLLI policies would appear to be like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone, when in fact, the only immutable truth here is that only women can breastfeed (if they have breasts).

Letters that were circulated to others have greatly upset some LLLI Board members. Could this be because they may have exposed that LLLI is not adhering to its legal purpose, thereby compromising its charitable status, and is using donated funds to promote transgenderism?

This image was paid for by general donations to LLL Canada, printed on tee shirts and worn by Leaders at a public function

“Woman” and “mother” still have sex-based definitions in common parlance among the communities which LLLGB serves and from which LLLGB draws its Leaders. Moreover “woman” and “mother” have sex-based definitions in UK law. There is UK case law asserting the significance of the word mother as a sex-based term. The Children Act 1989 differentiates between the mother of a child and the father or “other parent” of that child. A mother has a special status in law.

Many continue to not understand the legal purpose of LLLI. It is an organization, by definition, that excludes most of the world's population; it is discriminatory. LLLGB is inclusive of all mothers who wish to breastfeed as they are required to do by UK law. By promoting male lactation and celebrating the transgender community, LLLI is involving itself in activities, contrary to law, that have nothing to do with mothers breastfeeding their babies. They seem not to comprehend that they are contravening both UK law and the objectives of LLLGB. The LLLI inclusivity policy is contrary to the purpose (objectives) of LLLI and therefore ultra vires and unenforceable.

I would hope we don’t support male sexual fetishes at the expense of babies.

LLLI and LLLGB are single sex organizations. It may eventually dawn on the LLLI Board members that they are also acting contrary to US law and their own Articles of Incorporation. LLLI is giving tax receipts for donations to a charity whose purpose is to educate mothers about breastfeeding but who are also promoting its services to men; this is contrary to Illinois charity law.

The fundamental questions are

· What is LLLI; who does it want to serve?

· Who can it serve?

· Does it have the legal right to not be "single-sex organization" given the Articles of Incorporation?

We know that not-for-profit organizations can legally discriminate. UK law does not have a law that protects gender identity, but it does protect sex discrimination.

Sacrificing reality for a false principle

Collectively, the six Leaders who have been pilloried for following the actual aims and objectives of LLLGB have collectively amassed over 50 years of volunteering for helping women to breastfeed their babies. Several of them are lone Leaders, which means that if they are expelled their groups will no longer exist. Would LLLI rather many women in the UK go without any free breastfeeding support to further their aim of queering LLL? Pity that no one is consulting British babies about this, because I’m sure they would have plenty to say.

If you think that those brave Leaders who are endeavoring to hold LLLGB to its stated purpose should be celebrated, rather than persecuted, feel free to email the LLLI Board at board@llli.org

Used with the permission of the artist.