Vulnerability and victimhood: what is at stake here?

"Rainbow" communities are not the victims; it's real women, children and babies who pay the price for believing in a false ideology

It’s women being bashed by men rioting to shut us up who are in real danger. Not those who claim that women speaking publicly are “killing” transgender believers with our words.

One of these sperm will penetrate the egg after binding to carbohydrates on the zona pellucida. This is how every mammal begins their life; one egg, one sperm. YORGOS NIKAS/PHOTO RESEARCHERS, INC.

All mammals go through various life stages that begin when a sperm penetrates an egg and ends at some point through either an untimely accident or illness or ultimately, through death from old age, where bodies, to put it simply, cease to work anymore.

This unending reproductive cycle is well understood by everyone as it is all around us. We are surrounded not just by the examples of our own families, but those of everyone we know. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald is memorable because it takes this universal truth and reverses it. Benjamin is born age 70 and gets younger with every year that follows. The reason this story resonates is because it can never happen.

Humans, like other animals, are vulnerable to injury or death at any stage of the life cycle, but depending on their age, some periods of the life cycle are more precarious for survival than others. Leaving aside the starting point of the embryonic/fetal phase before birth, the two most vulnerable time periods to live are at opposite ends of the life cycle. Largely at the mercy of the care of others, infancy and old age are the most dangerous phases of life.

Old age always ends in inevitable death, however considerable the care of others may be.

The first few years of life and especially the newborn period through the first year can be especially challenging to survive. Because we are totally dependent on the selfless and sacrificing actions of our mothers for everything, we need to make it to an older age. Without any ability to find food, warmth and shelter, if no adult steps up, no one would make it to childhood or beyond.

For most mammals this is absolutely the truth. Losing a mother in infancy is a death sentence for most mammal babies. In humans, in most cases some other mother substitute will commit to a baby’s care, but until roughly the last 100 or so years, lack of an adequate breast milk substitute meant that just being cared for was no guarantee of survival.

This is a truth that the Founders of La Leche League (LLL) understood and honored. They recognized that babies were partners in a dyad; that babies need their mothers and mothers need their babies. And they both needed wider familial/societal support to optimize this foundational relationship.

Although the origins of LLL are firmly USA based, this organization has spread globally because of its recognition of the universal biological truth of the mother/baby dyad and relationship. In 1956 the year that LLL was founded, most of the scientific work around lactation was in dairy cattle, not human mothers. In an era that stifled women’s aspirations outside of the home, La Leche League was empowering for women in a manner that few other cultural movements were.

LLL has always regarded women as important and not ‘less than’ men. The importance of fathers (and as times changed, partners and wider family members) has always been acknowledged in supporting the breastfeeding dyad, but the primacy of the mother/baby relationship is the entire purpose of any organization that purports to support, encourage and inform breastfeeding and the issues around this.

The secret to over 65 years of success for LLL has been that it has served only one purpose: supporting women to breastfeed their babies. Breastfeeding as defined as putting a baby to the breast and not only feeding but nurturing a child until the child outgrows the need for this.

Everything else is considered either secondary or as a means to the end of this purpose. So pumping is not breastfeeding; it can be a choice a mother makes or a tool to maintain her breast milk production until her baby can learn, or re-learn, to breastfeed. But it is not in itself breastfeeding any more than a bike rider is “driving” to their destination.

Mothers and others recognize the innate and inherent vulnerability of babies. That is why they are willing to put their own lives on the line to care for them. The total disruption of their very existence is an expected part of becoming a parent. Yes, looking after a baby is a tough gig, but most parents do this with incredible love, patience and compassion. Without this, babies would not survive, let alone thrive.

Lately though, the LLLI Board has found that there is a group that is more vulnerable and in need of even more care and consideration than babies. These are adults (so have survived infancy themselves, thanks to the mothering they received) who identify as members of the “Rainbow Community”, but more specifically those who identify as “transgender”. This wide ranging and ever-expanding group includes everyone who prioritizes their “gender identity” over the realities of their sexed bodies. One of the salient features of this very small proportion of the general population is their wholesale claim to victimization. This self-assigned victim status is an integral facet of their new “identity” and anyone who does anything less than celebrate this is accused of “literal violence” and deliberate harm.

Um, does this look like a victim to you?

The human species has two sexes and they are sexually dimorphic. That is, they differ from one another in characteristic physical ways, large and small, usually outwardly visible but almost always present in chromosomes and internal anatomy. Until recently, this statement would have aroused no controversy at all, but for those who have been captured by the gender cult, this is heresy. An adjoining belief is that feelings are paramount and certainly more important than any physical manifestation as portrayed by bodies as they are.

By adopting this belief system, the LLLI Board has broken the stated understanding that has worked for so long. Mixing causes has been prohibited since 1956 until now when it has become more important to support gender questioning adults than women who want to breastfeed their babies. Presenting these women (alongside men who wish to engage in breastfeeding as a facet of a sexual fetish) as the most vulnerable has left LLL abandoning babies in favor of these adults making unconventional choices that they then expect those around them to celebrate.

And not joining in means Leaders (who are all volunteer support workers) face vitriolic attacks if they dissent from the transgender orthodoxy that the Board has now prioritized over the needs of babies.

On a LLL Leader’s Facebook page there were complaints from gender woo adherents about the now defunct website mothersformother.com and its campaign to preserve the mother/baby relationship from the perils of a political ideology that considers babies to be more props for a performance art lifestyle than human beings with their own agency and human rights.

This comment highlighted below was written in response to an article published on mothersformother.com. The comment is illustrative of the disordered thinking that now overrides breastfeeding information, support and encouragement:

My trans teen and I had a great conversation about this this morning (when I slapped my forehead in frustration and they asked what was wrong). They may not ever have a biological child but they do want to parent, and if they do then they want to feed human milk, and they want to be supported in doing so the same way I was when I nursed them. Yet an organization that only welcomes mothers is so clearly excluding them that they would never approach it in the first place. Why does it have to be so complicated?

An entire book could be written about this comment and space doesn’t permit this here. The main points are easily summarized though.

My trans teen: “trans kids” are an adult invention. Children are not born with any sense of gender identity, but are socialized into the cultural norms of the society they live in. Many gender non-conforming children turn into gay adults, but for some parents, this is not an acceptable outcome. Gender dysphoria is a sign of mental distress that if not explored, continues to negatively impact the lives of those who attempt to transition because merely changing one’s appearance does not alleviate other mental health problems. No one is “born in the wrong body” and mental health challenges can’t be fixed by drugs and surgeries.

They may not ever have a biological child: because the combination of puberty blockers (which are not reversible and don’t “pause” puberty, they stop it happening, which is why they are called blockers) and cross sex hormones render children permanently infertile, so denying children the right to ever reproduce (or in fact, have a normal adult sex life that includes the pleasure of achieving orgasm).

They do want to parent: so they will need to use the sexed body of some other woman to produce a child for them through the dangerous process that is egg donation, followed by the “womb rental” that is gestational surrogacy. Which has negative health effects for that woman and causes trauma for the baby when it is removed from the “gestational carrier”. Surrogacy is a form of buying a human being.

They want to feed human milk: which will have to come from the sexed body of a woman and her labor, which she is unlikely to be paid for. Would you work for free? Yes, it is true that LLL Leaders work for free as this is the nature of volunteer labor. But expecting a mother to routinely pump (while continuing to breastfeed her own baby), in addition to her other mothering work to meet the need of a self-chosen handicap, as opposed to helping out a struggling mother with a sick or early baby is not a reasonable assumption. Those who have voluntarily elected to remove their healthy glandular tissue should not assume that other women will step into the breach they have created.

An organization that only welcomes mothers: mothers make up 100% of the “people” having babies around the world. Choosing to not identify as a mother does not remove the fact that only women can give birth. As LLL is founded on “mother to mother” help, this is not an unreasonable expectation. Mothers do not have the lived experience or expertise to support those who have had elective mastectomies or who are male bodied, but claim the “right” to breastfeed. There are other groups that will meet the needs of trans or non-female bodied persons who need help feeding their babies. Would you join a knitting group and complain that no one helped you with your sewing project?

How do you get around the problem that not everyone can breastfeed?

Why does it have to be so complicated?  Because gender ideology which is based on queer theory is deliberately obfuscating, chaotic, confusing and in the end, senseless. This is not a design flaw, but a deliberate feature. Biological reality on the other hand, is simple and easy to understand. That biology has been rejected along with other truths only means that until reality regains the upper hand, the wholesale harming of children too young to consent to treatment will continue with the complicity of their parents and medical teams.

A victimhood mindset is an important part of this identity and lifestyle. Claiming to always be a victim at the mercy of a prejudiced “cisgendered heteronormative” society is very useful tool to gain advantages you would not otherwise be entitled to (seen mainly in the context of male bodied persons invading the public/private spaces set aside for women). Most people (and women in particular) are socialized to “be kind” to others, even at the expense of their own wellbeing. This is used to guilt parents and others into compliance that they may have grave doubts about.

There is a lot of misinformation around about suicide risks and the trans community (hence the oft-heard phrase “would you rather have a dead daughter than a live son?”, which is a coercive and untrue phrase used frequently). Children who question their gender identity more often than not have other co-morbidities such as depression, anxiety, autism or family trauma that complicates their diagnosis and treatment and in the current climate of “affirmation only” a concentration on gender identity alone is considered a ‘cure’ for everything. The ever-growing number of those detransitioning who feel that someone should have said “no” to them is telling.

In its quest to support “everyone” to breastfeed (which is promoting a falsehood as not everyone can breastfeed) are the LLLI Board and its gender ideological supporters really prepared to make adults (who made independent choices to alter their bodies) the most vulnerable victims in this clash of beliefs? What happened to standing up for babies?