Why JK Rowling is right to warn about trans women trying to ‘chestfeed’ babies – Susan Dalgety

Let that sink in. Public money is being used to support the fantasy that a man can breastfeed a baby. The national charity LGBT Health and Wellbeing, which receives upwards of £1 million a year in public funding and various grants, runs a weekly session in Edinburgh entitled “Queer Milk”.

The name alone is enough to turn my stomach, but what the sessions offer is surely beyond the pale. They are billed as for anyone who is “breastfeeding, chestfeeding or giving human milk to their baby in any amount… no matter what your feeding journey looks like”, including biological males.

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Majority of babies now breastfed

Breast milk is one of the miracles of life. It provides newborn infants and growing babies with all the nutrients required for a healthy childhood and adult life. A woman’s breasts get ready to feed a baby from puberty onwards, with actual milk production starting in the middle of pregnancy.

As a useful article on NHS Grampian’s website explains, as soon as a baby suckles, nerve impulses are sent to the mother’s brain to activate her pituitary gland, where two key hormones, prolactin and oxytocin, are made and released into her bloodstream.

When the prolactin reaches a woman’s breasts, it causes cells to start assembling all the amazing components needed to make breastmilk, and oxytocin stimulates tiny myo-epithelial cells to contract and squeeze the milk towards a woman’s nipples, ready for her baby to suckle.

Thanks in no small part to decades of public health campaigns by the NHS, the majority of babies born in Scotland are now breastfed for at least some time after birth, and for the first time since data collection began in 2002/03 more babies are being breastfed at six to eight weeks than are being formula-fed only. Flushed with success, the NHS now supports the delusion that biological men can breastfeed too.

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Induced lactation

It seems that some men who ‘identify’ as women are keen to ‘breastfeed’ a baby to affirm their new ‘female’ identity. The baby may be their partner’s child, it may be adopted or the result of a surrogacy arrangement. What is certain is that the man did not give birth, nor can he breastfeed his child.

There is a complex intervention called induced lactation which uses a combination of hormone medications, testosterone blockers and frequent breast pumping to stimulate ‘milk’ production, but at best a man can only secrete around 30mls of a liquid at any one time. On average, a baby will require 750mls a day of nutrient-rich breast milk during its first six months of life.

There is also a growing concern among women's rights campaigners that some men have a sexual interest in breastfeeding and that babies are being abused, sometimes with the unknowing complicity of health workers and charities.

As Milli Hilli, author of Give Birth Like a Feminist, said in 2024, breastfeeding is not about the experience of the person doing the feeding, “it is about nourishing and nurturing a baby... There is no reason for an adult to do this [chestfeeding] to a baby, and I would go so far as to describe it as abusive.”

It’s a view echoed by Women’s Rights Network Scotland among others, which this week described chestfeeding as “child abuse”. The group has written to Health Secretary Angela Constance, urging her to reconsider funding a charity that “promotes such unscientific and harmful practices”.

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Perilous state of maternity services

Labour MSP Carol Mochan concurs, saying that while people are “free to do as they wish within the law”, she believes that groups like Queer Milk should not receive public funds. She added: “This government really needs to get control of this issue because I fear Scotland is going down a worrying path when it comes to women’s health.”

Only a few weeks ago, I wrote about the perilous state of Scotland’s maternity services, which has prompted an independent review. Yet here is public money being spent supporting men to indulge in a practice that, at best, can only be described as nauseating, at worst child abuse.

How did we get here? Quite simply because of the big lie that human beings can change their sex. We have endured more than a decade of politicians, charities, even church leaders, hectoring us about trans rights. Language was distorted to fit the delusion, with pregnant women reduced to ‘birthing people’.

Vulnerable young women were told, often by charities funded from the public purse, that if their breasts were cut off they would miraculously become men. And men who had lived out their fantasy of being female in secret were now applauded in public as ‘women’ of courage.

After years of this level of duplicity, is it any wonder that the Scottish government and our National Health Service, two of the biggest perpetrators of this confidence trick, support the biggest lie of all – that a man can breastfeed a baby?

I expect those of us appalled by the concept of “queer milk” will be dubbed bigots. Indeed, author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling warned as much earlier this week: “Doubtless the Scottish government will tell us that if we think men full of cross-sex hormones who get a thrill out of babies latching on to their chemically enhanced chests is blatant child abuse, ‘you are a transphobe.’”

If that is the case, then I am a proud transphobe and I am confident I am not alone.