Euan McColm: State-funded 'chestfeeding' by trans-identifying males is unforgivable abuse of infants

Almost always, a rhythm is found and maintained.

Sometimes, however, this simple connection cannot be made: Perhaps the baby won’t latch on, perhaps the mother feels great physical discomfort when he does.

An inability to breastfeed can be a source of anguish for new mothers. I’ve heard testimony from many friends over the years about feelings of guilt and inadequacy, exacerbated by relentless pressure to make it happen. For some, the concession that their newborn would have to be bottle fed felt like a colossal failure on their part.

Of course, this was never so. The inability to breastfeed does not mean some lesser maternal instinct. In fact, isn’t the intensity of that instinct revealed by the torment “resorting” to the bottle can cause?

Babies do not care about the complex feelings of their mothers. They need to be fed and that’s an end to it.

And so, when the bottle is required, the bottle it is. The needs of the baby, quite rightly, take precedence over the feelings of the mother.

Unless that “mother” happens to be a man, of course.

If you’re a male who wants to “breastfeed” then – and I can scarcely believe I’m typing these words – you can expect to be supported in achieving this objective by the state.

The organisation LGBT Health and Wellbeing, which receives hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money each year, is currently running weekly support sessions during which men are encouraged to give “human milk to their babies”.

The group, called Queer Milk, welcomes LGBTQ+ parents “breastfeeding, chestfeeding or giving human milk to their baby in any amount”. This will be supported “no matter what your feeding journey looks like”.

Enough, surely, is enough.

Men cannot breastfeed and the desire by some to do so is not proof that they are, essentially, female but the grim manifestation of a grim perversion.

The liquid produced by some men after extensive hormone treatment is not breastmilk. It is of no nutritional value and our condemnation of anyone feeding it to babies should be instinctive.

If the “milk” produced by trans-identifying males is of no benefit to the baby, why do they insist on going through this weird roleplay of the mothering experience? Why do these men wish their nipples to be suckled by infants?

There is, I’m afraid, no answer to that deeply troubling question that is not deeply troubling and we must all stop pretending otherwise.

For years, now, trans activists have muddied the waters to make them seem deep: We have been invited to believe quirks of nature – the ability of the male clownfish to change sex, for example – support the idea that someone might be born in the wrong body; women have been urged by activists peddling junk science to ignore millennia of instinct and accept men into single-sex safe spaces; simple laws have been caricatured as complex and unworkable by men whose desire to be validated as the women they wish to be trumps the safety of the women they are not.

Time and again, we have pretended that there is a legitimate debate to be had on these issues, that there is some balance to be struck between women’s rights and trans rights.

This is entirely the wrong way to look at things. The reality is that there is no balance to be struck between women’s rights and the demands of trans-identifying men.

A smugly complacent “progressive” political class has spent the past decade capitulating to order after order from activists and it is only now, after clarification from the Supreme Court that women are biologically female, that public bodies are starting, once again, to uphold their sex-based rights.

There are, across the public and charity sectors, people of power and influence whose belief that transwomen actually are women remains unshakeable.

These activists continue to do terrible damage to the rights and the safety of women and girls whose entitlement to single-sex spaces has been ignored by councils, the NHS, and The Scottish government.

That government has now spent more than £1 million on losing cases involving gender-ID. With each defeat, we have been urged to accept that these were necessary court actions.

None of them have ever been remotely so. Every time John Swinney greenlights another legal defence of utterly indefensible gender woo, he is jumping to the tune of people who think we should simply accept the public funding of a group called Queer Milk.

Anyone with even a cursory interest in the matter of child safeguarding must surely wonder whether an organisation which encourages the use of babies as living props in the dark fantasies of men might merit further investigation by, at the very least, its government and NHS funders.

Queer Milk is not an anomaly. It is the sort of thing now routinely funded by the Scottish government and defended by politicians and activists who condemn critics as bigots.

But there is nothing bigoted about believing it an outrage that groups like this exist.

It is, I think, time for moral judgement. It is time to kink-shame.

When a newborn cries for the comfort of his mother, she responds, instinctively, with nourishment. This drive remains overwhelming, whether feeding by breast or bottle.

The “breastfeeding” of babies by trans-identifying men is not, in even the tiniest way, comparable.

It is, instead, a grotesque simulacrum of motherhood, deeply insulting to women and unforgivably abusive to the infants involved.