Season 2 Episode 7

Alexis: Our babies name us. So the word mother is present in many, many languages – some variation of mother. And this word comes from the utterance of the baby at the breast going ‘mm, mm, mm’. Our babies name us. I’m not giving that up. It’s such an honour. I’m not going to throw it away and be neutralised or told that I’m the same as my baby’s father, I’m not. It’s more about controlling women and it feels very patriarchal to me. It doesn’t feel like liberation to not be able to describe my body or my experience because I need to be kind and I might upset or offend someone.

Stassja Frei: Birthing person. Menstruator. Uterus owner. Person with a uterus. Person with a cervix. Pregnant person. Chestfeeder. Person who bleeds. Bleeder. Vulva haver. Labia haver. Non trans women. Non men. Bodies with vaginas. These are just some of the so called inclusive terms that have been used in mainstream publications to describe women. That last one – ‘bodies with vaginas’ – was infamously printed on the front cover of an issue of The Lancet – an internationally renowned medical journal that was founded in 1823. And just this week as I’m writing this script a new contender for most offensive pseudonym for woman has entered the lexicon. Inseminated person. This one appeared in a budget proposal for the US state of Wisconsin. 

The rationale behind this tortured and offensive language is that it’s kind and inclusive of trans people. Women who say that they’re men don’t want to be called women. For some reason they prefer to be called uterus owners. And because transwomen are women, that means that some women have penises. So we can longer refer to people with uteruses as women because that would exclude transwomen which is very hurtful. 

The solution therefore is to avoid at all costs the use of the word woman. 

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Welcome back to Desexing Society. I’m your host Stassja Frei. Episode 7: The Word is Woman

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Karleen Gribble: So my name’s Karleen Gribble, I’m an adjunct associate professor at the schools of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University. I do research in breastfeeding predominantly and I came to that because I had a baby and I had been doing work in plant physiology and after I had my son, it just didn’t seem so interesting anymore. So I moved in a new direction and I’ve been doing that now for – getting close to 30 years.

Stassja Frei: In early 2022, Karleen and nine other co-authors published a paper titled Effective Communication About Pregnancy, Birth, Lactation, Breastfeeding and Newborn Care: The Importance of Sexed Language. The paper explored the problems that arise when we replace words like woman with supposedly inclusive terms like “people with a cervix.” Karleen had been pondering the issue for a few years. She saw parallels between misguided covid-19 advice and the gender-neutral language being pushed in women’s healthcare.

Karleen Gribble: So I’d spent all of the pandemic pretty much railing against what was happening with mothers and babies. We knew from the beginning that covid didn’t pose a risk to the health of newborns but we had the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recommending at the beginning of the pandemic that mothers who had covid-19 should be separated from their babies immediately after birth and that recommendation spread around the world, including to countries that have quite high infant mortality rates. So we don’t know how many babies died because of that but it’s undoubtable that there were a lot who died because of the spread of that recommendation from the US. 

Stassja Frei: As mothers and their newborn babies were being separated in numbers the world had never before seen, health organisations were erasing the word mother from their communications, instead replacing it with terms like ‘parents’ and ‘families’. For Karleen, both of these actions devalued the significance of mothers to their infants and the cost of separating them.

Karleen Gribble: And I was just, I was seeing the desexing of language spreading from the US to other western countries and pressure being placed on people who were working in lower resource countries, non western countries to actually make changes as well, and understanding that that could have really serious impacts for women and children. And so that’s when I kind of went, no more. We’ve seen this export of culture and policy from the US around covid-19. This idea of desexing language is very clearly coming from the US and spreading to other western countries and beyond. We need to actually talk about this and help people to understand why it’s happening, how it’s happening and what are the potential ramifications, and provide some solutions of ways of managing it as well because most people have got really good intentions, but they just don’t really understand it.

Stassja Frei: Karleen and her co-authors came up with the terms ‘sexed language’ and ‘desexed language’ to describe what was happening in women’s healthcare. 

Karleen Gribble: Replacements for women would be things like ‘pregnant people’ potentially or ‘birthing people’, ‘vagina havers’, ‘cervix owners’ – some of them are awful like ‘people capable of penetrative vaginal sex’, in one instance. So it’s more often referencing processes or referencing body parts. And the issue with that is that we know from- we’ve known for a long time, that when you refer to someone by referencing body parts or processes that that’s quite dehumanising and particularly when you’re talking about pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, you know women are actually quite vulnerable in those circumstances. 

Stassja Frei: For the average woman, these terms are degrading and offensive. But transgender activists consider such language to be respectful and inclusive of trans people. Because according to the transgender belief system, some men have vaginas and can get pregnant. Those men are of course women pretending to be men. And they get terribly upset when they’re referred to as women or mothers.

Karleen Gribble: Desexing of- or replacement terms for the word mother, that’s where I’m really you know- that’s where I really got concerned because I know from my work- so a lot of my work has been with the most vulnerable mothers and their children. So women whose children are in and out of home care, women whose children have been adopted, foster carers, so women- mothers who are foster carers, in situations where surrogacy arrangements are in place, my observation has been that whenever people want to marginalise the mother, they do one of two things, they either avoid using the word mother at all or they qualify it. So an example where the word mother is avoided at all is in relation to surrogacy, so people will go to all sorts of extremes, they really hate to refer to the woman who gestated and birthed a baby in a surrogacy arrangement as a mother and so, so that’s one example there. 

Stassja Frei: The surrogacy industry refers to mothers as “surrogates,” “gestational carriers,” and even as, “a surrogate uterus.” 

Karleen Gribble: For mothers who are foster carers it’s similar you know they are mothering the child, the child may in fact see them as their mother, the mother who’s providing their day to day care but people don’t want to refer to them as the mother because they see that as impinging upon their biological mother, but again, there is this, I mean I use this word biological mother because I need to distinguish between the two mothers but people in adoption, the term birth mother has been used to marginalise those women and so they- it’s almost as if by using the term birth that their only significance is in having given birth to the child and it’s not continuing. You’ll see that particularly in US adoption agencies about how they talk about pregnant women who are considering placing their baby for adoption – she’s pregnant, she is the mother, she has not relinquished the child but they still talk about her as being the birth mother. And so, you know, so that sort of separation of the mother and child, the need to distance them with you know, terms like gestational carrier, it’s not a term that reflects the weight that the word mother has which is about connection, it’s about caring, it’s about love, it’s a very powerful word, and that’s why people try to avoid it if they’re wanting to marginalise mother. And so what do we do if we spread that everywhere?

Stassja Frei: In their paper, Karleen and her co-authors describe the profound importance of the word mother, writing, quote: “There is a word for mother in every language. It is commonly the first word said by children and is perhaps the oldest word ever spoken. “Mother” holds meaning beyond that of “female parent” containing connotations of “nurturing”, “nourishing,” “love”, “responsibility”, and “child rearing” that support the importance of mothers to children.” End quote.

It’s woman’s greatest superpower – the ability to bring new life into the world. In our role as mothers, women have been both revered and, on the other hand, enslaved and traded amongst men as livestock for breeding. The pretence that pregnancy and childbirth is something that “people” do, displaces women from this fundamental role as life givers. And it obscures the fact that motherhood is inherently female. Men cannot get pregnant. So called transmen can get pregnant and give birth because they are female, not because they’re men.

There’s also speculation amongst some anthropologists and feminists that in prehistoric times, women’s menstruation was also viewed as another of our superpowers. This hypothesis says that before humans had medical knowledge or an understanding of sexual reproduction, they would’ve linked blood loss to death. So woman’s ability to bleed without dying gave us a godly quality that made us figures of worship.

It’s a beautiful theory. Especially compared to just how taboo menstruation is around the world today. It’s very much used to shame girls and women. So when the transgender movement starts referring to women as menstruators and bleeders, it sets women back decades.

Karleen Gribble: The one that I think I dislike the most is ‘menstruator.’ And it’s being used really inappropriately. There was a paper published in The Lancet Western Pacific that talked about the experiences of women who experienced disability around menstruation in Vanuatu and instead of talking about them as women with a disability they talked about them as menstruators with a disability and it’s so, so offensive, because those women would not have been asked about being referred to by a stigmatising body process and they knew it was stigmatising because significant parts of the paper talked about how stigmatised menstruation was in Vanuatu. And in Vanuatu, this is not somewhere where gender identity has cultural salience at the moment, so it was offensive not just for the women who weren’t asked – and it should never have been published like that, it should not have gotten through to publication because they hadn’t asked the women – and secondly, from a cultural imperialism aspect, applying these language changes to a context where it doesn’t have cultural salience, it’s just cultural imperialism, it’s neo colonialism. It’s really offensive.

Stassja Frei: In a similar vein, inclusive language can lead to the exclusion of already marginalised women.

Karleen Gribble: If for example you’re from a non English speaking background, or you’ve got a low level of education you might not know that you are a ‘person with a cervix’ because cervix is quite a technical sounding name, it’s for a part of the body that people don’t see, that they don’t commonly name and so if you’re putting out health promotion for cervical cancer testing and you’re just talking about ‘people with a cervix’ then a lot of women might not read any further or hear any further to actually know that this message is intended for them. Whereas the word ‘women’ is a very common word. If you’re learning the language it’s going to be one of the first words that you learn and so it’s much more easily understood and this concept of plain language in health communication is like rock solid principal like it’s not something that’s new, it’s not something that we don’t understand but just why and how these language changes are being made without – as far as I’ve been able to gather – any research being done, without any impact assessments being done, I don’t understand.

Stassja Frei: In the rush to be seen as inclusive, those pushing desexed language can actually end up confusing their message to the point where it becomes inaccurate. 

Karleen Gribble: It’s incredible how some communications are being made that are just plain incorrect because they’ve shifted words. So one of the most obvious ones, an example, was from the NHS in the UK where they had a website that talked about 8 in 10 people will get pregnant within a year after having unprotected sex. And you’re like, well that’s a miracle isn’t it? If 8 in 10 people will get pregnant. So you get those sorts of mistakes which are extremely common. One of Australia’s endometriosis organisations was talking about one in 10 people getting endometriosis, which is not true. Males and females do not get this at the same rate, it’s really a condition that females experience.

Stassja Frei: Another example of this came from the Australian Department of Health. In 2021, they updated their COVID-19 vaccination decision making guide for women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or planning pregnancy.

Karleen Gribble: When they published it initially it referred to women throughout. Then after a few months they changed it and someone went through and did a ‘find and replace’ and replaced all uses of ‘women’ with ‘people.’ And what happened with that is what happens so often when you do that, the sex of the person is important when it comes to Covid-19. Men become- are more frequently more ill than women are. And so when they did that find and replace, their statistics were out, because they went from comparing pregnant women to non pregnant women, saying, you know, 5 times more likely to be hospitalised if you’re pregnant than if you’re not, to talking about pregnant people vs non pregnant people and of course non pregnant women and non pregnant people are two different groups of people. You’re supposed to use plain language and be as clear as you can when you’re communicating health information to the public and they ditched that by the wayside as well.

Stassja Frei: After being ridiculed in the media for this decision, the Department of Health changed the wording back to women centred language.

It’s truly remarkable the lengths that bureaucrats are going to, to appease such a tiny fraction of the population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that only 0.9% of the adult population identifies as transgender. And of that 0.9% only a miniscule amount would be women who say they’re men who are having babies. 

In the 2018-19 financial year, Medicare data showed that out of more than 315,000 women who gave birth across Australia, only 22 of them were women who say they’re men. That’s 0.007% of women who gave birth that year. So why are we pretending that people give birth rather than women? Is there a better way to accommodate women who say they’re men? A way that doesn’t involve the wholesale desexing of pregnancy and birth?

Karleen Gribble: It’s not that we should be ignoring people for whom sexed language doesn’t work well. I think that what we need is to apply our well established and understood principles of using plain and clear language, which means sexed language where sex is important in our public health communications and our policies. But equally that doesn’t mean that we should ignore people for whom sexed language is an issue for them in terms of accessing healthcare. Because they have these particular needs, we should be providing tailored communications and tailored services to them in order that they get good healthcare and healthcare that’s appropriate and accessible to them but we haven’t seen a lot of that happening either. So I guess that’s the thing. We need to recognise that there are circumstances where not using sexed language and prioritising gender identity is a valid thing to do and is a helpful thing to do and there are circumstances where we shouldn’t. And it’s not, you know we do this for other groups. We have health communications in different languages for example.

Stassja Frei: What’s truly bizarre about all of this, is that women who say that they’re men go to great lengths to try and appear male. But pregnancy is the most female thing in the whole world. So you’d think that being pregnant would trigger serious gender dysphoria in trans identified women. But for some reason, they seem more upset about being misgendered in pregnancy information.

In healthcare, this fear of being misgendered can have dire results for trans identifying people.

Karleen Gribble: People are changing the sex markers on their health records on a regular basis and that places their health at risk. They’re being placed at risk of misdiagnosis, of missed diagnosis and delayed diagnosis and sometimes the result of that can be quite severe and it is quite important, particularly if you’re female and you look like you’re not, because testosterone’s such a powerful hormone on female bodies that you can be female and nobody can tell from looking at you that you are. It’s very important that your health records say that you’re female because that can really impact the healthcare that you receive. And so there’s an example that’s been published in the New England Journal of Medicine where somebody went to hospital with abdominal- sporadic abdominal pain and they were in fact pregnant and in labour but because the sex marker was incorrect on the health record, that really wasn’t identified as quickly as it should have been. This person had a prolapsed umbilical cord and the baby died. So I think, I don’t quite understand how we’ve ended up in a situation where people are allowed to change the health markers on their sex records- on their health records. There should be a way of recording gender identity or recording medical treatments in health records so that people understand what is going on, but they shouldn’t be able to change their sex marker because it’s dangerous. It’s not helpful to them to do that.

Stassja Frei: How we wound up in this situation can once again be traced back to the 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act. Those amendments triggered the federal Labor government to issue Guidelines on the Recognition of Sex and Gender. Those Guidelines instructed all federal government departments and agencies that collect personal information from citizens, to allow individuals to change their recorded sex. Furthermore, Australians would henceforth be able to select male, female or X as their sex marker with X meaning non-binary. 

And thus, Medicare became the first federal government service to adopt sex self-ID. 

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La Leche League International is an organisation with an important mission. That is to, quote: “help mothers worldwide to breastfeed through mother-to-mother support, encouragement, information, and education.” End quote. Sadly, this organisation has turned itself inside out trying to accommodate people’s gender identities. 

Sydney based mother, Alexis – not her real name – joined La Leche League as a volunteer breastfeeding counsellor in 2018. 

Alexis: I joined because I’d had my sons a couple of years before and I really struggled to breastfeed and I later educated myself and I came to realise that it was so unnecessary how I suffered and how my son suffered and I felt so derailed by people within the health system that I joined La Leche League to try and heal some of my own experience and make it that other mothers didn’t have to go through what I went through.

Stassja Frei: Counsellors within La Leche League are known as Leaders.

Alexis: So I ran community meetings that were once or twice a month, they were very popular, I’m very proud of them. And I also provided one to one support for mothers. Sometimes that was in person, sometimes that was on the phone, sometimes we had a zoom call. It was probably more phone support just because it’s hard for women to get out and about with young babies. Often by the time a mother contacts me, she has been to hell and back, told her story six or seven times and just isn’t getting very basic support with positioning. Women need all kinds of support to breastfeed. Some women need a listening ear. They have a partner who’s really unsupportive and might be saying something like ‘look, I know you really want to breastfeed but you’re crying, you’re a mess, let’s give some formula’ so sometimes those women need someone to say ‘you are doing so well, I am in awe of how strong you are and how much you’ve overcome in five short days. You’re amazing.’ So that woman needs a bit of confidence raising. Other women need very basic support with positioning. They need like tweaks. Like turn your baby’s tummy to face you. ‘Oh that’s more comfortable.’ ‘Ok lean back.’ ‘Ah, that’s good’ you know. So you know the counsellor’s role is many and varied and that’s what I love about it actually.

Stassja Frei: La Leche League was established in 1956 in Illinois, USA by seven women fondly known as the founding mothers. The idea was sparked by two friends, Marian Tompson and Mary White. They were at a church picnic and were breastfeeding their babies when several women came over to share how they had wanted to breastfeed but they didn’t get the right help, so they’d switched to bottle feeding their babies with formula. Marian and Mary realised that the problems these women had faced were not uncommon. And they were convinced that those mothers could have easily breastfed if they’d just had better information and support.

So the two women agreed to meet at Mary’s house, invite some friends and hold what would be their first ever mother to mother peer support meeting. Within just a few months there were so many women asking to attend, the meeting had to be split into two groups. Clearly there was a significant need for this kind of support. From there, more and more groups formed. They published a pamphlet. The pamphlet was turned into a book called The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. Today, La Leche League International operates in more than 80 countries around the world. It has consultative status with UNICEF, the United Nations’ Children’s Emergency Fund. And it also works with the World Health Organisation.

But, I hear you asking, why is it called La Leche League?

Alexis: La Leche League formed at a time when the words breast and breastfeeding were not widely accepted language and they weren’t words you could publish or put on a poster or put in the phone book. The name La Leche comes from the Spanish word leche which means milk 

Stassja Frei: La Leche League translates to The Milk League. Back in 1956, the word ‘breastfeeding’ was so taboo, it wasn’t used in public. Now, nearly 70 years later, we’ve sadly come full circle and once again, we’re censoring which words women can and can’t use to refer to our own bodies. 

Alexis noticed the language changes very early on in the training she was receiving from a mentor.

Alexis: She brought in some of her own materials and I remember the first time she talked about ‘pregnant people’ and I was, I was struggling to follow her. This language had an effect on me where I- it was unclear and I didn’t- I sensed there was a shift in the language and I didn’t really understand what it was and it was explained to me that we wouldn’t want to offend people who identify as something other than mothers so we’ll call them people not women. And I sort of nodded and thought ‘oh ok, oh wow’ and I felt really side swiped by this because I had gone into this unpaid role doing my studies while bringing up two young kids, all I wanted to do was help other women and I really worried that I was going to be coming out into the wider community and upsetting and offending people which was the last thing that I wanted to do. And then I started noticing that the social media feed – the language was shifting. The website – the language was shifting. The other thing that happened was the organisation had this very marked shift away from supporting women to supporting breastfeeding families. And you know, families do not breastfeed. Families do not get mastitis. Families, do not wean. The breastfeeding rights of women and the importance of mothers to infants is not something that we should open up to include more people.

Stassja Frei: The queering of La Leche League was well underway despite the founders having built in safeguards to prevent such a take over.

Alexis: So the seven founding mothers of La Leche League were all religious women and they decided at the start of the organisation that this would be a non sectarian organisation. And they did that because they knew that bringing in religion and bringing in politics and bringing in other causes and other ideas would be divisive. And in order to be truly inclusive, and help the maximum amount of women wanting to breastfeed, we needed to take everything else out and just bring women together on the grounds of mothering through breastfeeding. So when we train as volunteers we have very very clear guidelines that we are not to begin or encourage discussion at group meetings around things that are divisive like vaccinations, politics, homeschooling, even baby wearing. The organisation doesn’t have a view. And that was the secret to the organisation’s success for so many decades. And unfortunately there are many women currently on the board who do not view this issue as mixing causes and do not acknowledge the inherent conflict between trans rights and women’s rights.

Stassja Frei: Eventually, in 2021, things came to a head. Volunteers who had been looking on in horror as this ideological coup took place, decided it was time to take action.

Alexis: A letter was written and sent to the international board and the executive directors saying that these changes amounted to cultural imperialism, linguistic imperialism, and was colonialist. This letter was translated into 9 languages and it was signed by over 250 volunteers.

Stassja Frei: The letter took aim at the organisation’s Cultural Sensitivity in Publications policy and called on the board to review that policy. They recommended that women should be allowed to write using whatever language they were most comfortable using. They pointed out that La Leche League is an international organisation, so the language used should be understandable on a global scale. Making it mandatory that publications use a variety of terms for ‘mother’ made those publications difficult to understand.

Alexis: So this was signed by volunteers from 45 countries – from Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka, South Korea, South Africa, Japan, Panama, Australia. We really brought together a lot of volunteers who were feeling really upset.

Stassja Frei: The board’s response was dismissive and combative. They took great umbrage at the suggestion that the language changes were a form of cultural imperialism, writing, quote: “Using a variety of terms for gender inclusion is not a hallmark of colonial oppression, rather the opposite. Western colonialism is responsible for suppressing the expression of gender diversity in many cultures around the world, and introducing concepts of homophobia and gender “norms” that were not a part of the indigenous cultures.” End quote. The pretence that indigenous cultures didn’t have their own versions of gender norms and homophobia before western colonisation, betrays a deep ignorance of those cultures. 

Alexis: So by 2021 the organisation was completely split. So there were leaders in the US- some leaders in the US who wanted to stop using the words ‘women’ and ‘mother’ entirely. There were breastfeeding counsellors in other parts of the world where gender ideology is not relevant who wanted to keep using the language we’ve always used. There were a third contingent of volunteers who don’t speak English and had no idea that the organisation was going down this path.

Stassja Frei: That same year, 2021, Alexis wrote a review of a webinar she’d attended. The topic of the webinar was the importance of mothers to their babies. She submitted the piece for publication in La Leche League’s online magazine, Breastfeeding Today.

Alexis: The edits that came back to me were not really about the content but these persistent changes to sexed language. So every time I had written the word ‘mother’ it was crossed out and there were a number of suggested alternative phraseology that I could use. And it didn’t make sense to me because this webinar was about the importance of mothers to their babies. So I said no I’m not going to do this. And I was told that I needed to abide by the newly revised Cultural Sensitivity in Publications Policy. And according to that policy all La Leche League publications were to use a variety of terms to describe the people we support. And so I wrote to the international board and I said, ‘whose culture am I being asked to be culturally sensitive to? Because here in Australia, we say ‘mother’.’

Stassja Frei: By this point, Alexis had already suffered quite serious retaliation for disagreeing with gender ideology. 

Alexis: The women who were feeling differently to me and working, volunteering in Australia, they refused to put my name and contact details on something that was meant to be a national website. They contacted women who were in my local community breastfeeding group – from interstate, they contacted women and told them, and told them things about me and told them that I didn’t believe that all women were women, you know contacting mothers who were in my group. I just- even as I think about it now I am so angry because by not providing my details and not letting women know that this support is available, it’s not even me who suffered, I suffered, but think about how many women didn’t get breastfeeding support who could have tapped me as a resource. It’s just, it’s so short sighted. So I was cancelled. I was, I would describe some of their behaviour as harassment. They catalogued some of my online interactions and they created it, sort of a dossier on me and then they circulated that to international committees as a reason not to allow me to join the organisation in the first place. So I sort of hatched as a breastfeeding counsellor already fighting just to do what I’d signed up to. And so by the time I wrote this letter I think I’d got a reasonably thick skin, however it did get so bad that at one point I wrote to the international board and I told them if they do not intervene I would get the police involved.

Stassja Frei: Woman’s cruelty to woman is another of the many tragedies of transgender ideology. Because adherents believe that any disagreement with transgenderism is based in a hatred of trans people, it means those haters are fair game. This gives licence to the meanest of mean girls to do everything in their power to destroy non compliant women. And there’s a big dopamine hit that comes with destroying one’s enemy. 

There’s also the lesser dopamine rush of simply scolding another woman.

Alexis: For the brief time that I was permitted in the La Leche League Australia Facebook group, which is the national forum, I observed that posts that began with ‘hi ladies’ or ‘hey mums’ were reprimanded, the poster was reprimanded, a comment would be made by an administrator: ‘we use inclusive language in this space. Please refrain from…’ and demanding that the mothers coming to us for support adjust the way that they ask for that support. And I was part of another forum where an Indigenous woman was told off for using the term ‘mother’s milk’ and she explained that that was the term that her family and her community used and that’s why she used it and she was told off for that and asked to use something else.

Stassja Frei: In 2021, with a heavy heart, Alexis decided she’d had enough.

Alexis: I hung in there as long as I could. I advocated in my own community and I also advocated through the Global Advocacy Committee. I wrote to the board. I did everything I could to continue in a respectful dialogue and keep the discussion going. And at a certain point I felt that the cost to me was just too high. I was sleep deprived. My family was getting the worst of me. I was very stressed. I found it started to impact my physical health and I just had enough and I resigned. And I was training three mothers at the time who had been coming to my group who wanted to start their own groups. I tried to encourage them to keep going. I was really aware that my decision was mine and if they wanted to step in and support other mothers that was great. And each one of those three women chose not to continue. So there’s currently no breastfeeding mother to mother support in my area. It’s a complete black spot for breastfeeding now, there’s nothing here. Mothers might travel maybe over half an hour now to find breastfeeding support.

Stassja Frei: A single volunteer resigning probably didn’t persuade the international board to reconsider their stance. But Alexis isn’t the only woman to have quit La Leche League. 

Alexis: About 2 years ago, Marian Tompson, one of the founding mothers, stepped back onto the international board and Marian would’ve been 92 or 93 years old at the time. I believe this was an attempt to help steer the organisation back towards its original mission, back to help the organisation. And in November 2024 Marian resigned from the board. She said that the organisation had become a travesty of its original intent. And she said that La Leche League was indulging the fantasies of adults and destroying the organisation. So she stepped down off the board and she also resigned as a volunteer and it’s incredibly sad.

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Stassja Frei: La Leche League’s presence in Australia is quite small. And it’ll probably always be small compared to the Australian Breastfeeding Association – the ABA. This is Australia’s peak body for breastfeeding. They offer a 24 hour helpline staffed by volunteers and they receive just over $3 million each year in government funding.

Just like La leche League, the ABA also started to dabble in gender ideology. In 2021, coincidentally the same year that La Leche League imploded, the ABA in conjunction with the not for profit organisation Rainbow Families, published a booklet titled Breastfeeding, Chestfeeding and Human Milk Feeding: Supporting LGBTQIA+ Families. I asked Alexis what she thought of the booklet.

Alexis: Coming from another organisation where gender ideology had been imposed top down and ran through every document and every news article and every everything, I actually felt that the existence of the Rainbow Families ABA Booklet wasn’t a bad thing. So a public health principle is not to change everything but to create a targeted resource for the minority community that is asking for it and broadly speaking that’s what the booklet was, it was a response to a specific need. And I actually felt that publishing it ring fenced this language and contained it and may have strengthened ABA’s ability to stay mother centred in their other publications. So they can point to the booklet and say ‘there it is, it’s over there.’ So in that sense I think that perhaps it’s a good thing. When I got into the nitty gritty of the content it was quite a mixed bag. So in the same way that the acronym itself – LGBTQIA++ is in itself a mixed bag with some competing and conflicting needs and ideas, the information in the booklet ranged from- so some of the stuff on intersex for example was pioneering. I’m not aware that there is information for mothers with some intersex variations who want to breastfeed. That could potentially be quite useful for those women and that’s great. But other things that are in the booklet are really problematic and an ethical minefield and controversial, divisive and undermine the mother baby relationship.

Stassja Frei: One of the chapter headings, for example, is Surrogacy. This has become popular amongst gay men. But many women consider it to be exploitation. The woman’s body is essentially rented out and the baby is a commodity – the product of a transaction. At birth, the baby is immediately separated from its mother which is traumatic for the infant. 

Co-feeding is another of the chapter headings found in the booklet. It’s when, quote “more than one lactating parent feeds human milk to their baby or child.” End quote. Obviously the most common situation where two parents would be breastfeeding is in a lesbian relationship. And yet, in that chapter, there is not a single use of the word lesbian. Co-feeding isn’t without its challenges. 

Alexis: For people who don’t know much about breastfeeding you might think ‘oh yeah you know just pass the baby around. More people to help.’ But there are so many- …breastfeeding is such a dynamic relationship that anything that interferes between the mother and baby’s proximity can really throw breastfeeding off. So the booklet’s written in mind that we establish breastfeeding between the mother and baby very very well before we do anything else.

Stassja Frei: The most problematic part of the booklet is in the chapter titled Relactation and Induced Lactation. According to the booklet, quote: “It is possible for a person who has never been pregnant or given birth to make milk. This makes it possible for non-birthing parents to feed their baby from their body.” End quote.

Alexis: So the main thing that I found to be a significant problem is that it’s supportive of males breastfeeding.

Stassja Frei: You have to read between the lines but it’s true. This booklet, produced in conjunction with the Australian Breastfeeding Association, supports male breastfeeding. The first clue reads, quote: “People who have never been pregnant, who no longer have (or have never had) ovaries or are past menopause can often produce some milk to varying levels.” End quote. People who have never had ovaries are typically known as men.

The chapter goes on to describe scenarios where LGBT+ people might consider inducing lactation. One of those examples reads, quote: “You are a transgender or gender diverse parent, but not the birthing parent.” End quote. 

Once again, that would include men. In this case, men who say that they’re women. 

Is it wise for the Australian Breastfeeding Association to be encouraging men to breastfeed?

Alexis: I don’t think the question is ‘should men be supported to breastfeed?’ the question is ‘why are we separating mothers and babies?’ So mothers have a fundamental right to be with their child and the child has a fundamental right for the mother, the mother’s milk and the mother’s body. Why are we separating them? What is the justification for that? La Leche League and ABA both explicitly say that breastfeeding is for the baby, not the other way around. So any man who wants to breastfeed, it’s about his fantasy or experience of breastfeeding, it’s not about what the baby needs and wants. So should men be allowed to breastfeed? Well why are we taking babies away from women in the first place? To act as a prop in a fantasy for a man. It’s totally mind boggling. And some of the men who want to breastfeed have autogynephilia. 

Stassja Frei: Some autogynephiles are sexually aroused by the idea of having female bodily functions. They get off on the idea of sitting down to pee. They’ll use pads or tampons to pretend that they’re menstruating. In one disturbing case, trans identified male, Gabrielle Darone pretended for 40 weeks that he was pregnant. He planned to use an electric muscle stimulator to mimic labour contractions. And he was welcomed by some very naïve women into a breastfeeding support group on Facebook. There he spoke about inducing lactation and wanting to donate the milk.

In another example, trans identified male, Dana Fried, wrote an article about his experience breastfeeding his infant child. He said, quote: “when my baby attached to my breast, there was an incredible chemical cascade that ran through my entire body like lightning. Imagine the most electric thing a partner has ever done to you, then multiply it by 10. I could feel my brain rewiring, creating pathways that would permanently connect me to my child. (And yeah, I kind of got off on it. Don’t judge.).” End quote. I’m not afraid to say that I’m definitely judging you, Dana. Clearly you got a sexual thrill out of this. And one day your child will find your words online and will also judge you.

There’s another group of men who also have a bizarre obsession with breastfeeding. They’re known as lactophiles. I’ll let Helen Joyce explain this one. She’s the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and she’s also the Director of Advocacy at the UK charity, Sex Matters. Here she’s speaking with Andrew Gold on his YouTube channel, Heretics.

Helen Joyce: So there is a fetish for breastfeeding – a male fetish for breastfeeding. It normally focuses on milking women. I’m very sorry to have to share this with your listeners. I didn’t enjoy finding out about it. It’s called lactophilia. And if you go on reddit or flickr you will find that there are communities and groups dedicated to what’s called “HuCow.” It stands for human cow. And it’s about milking women. And there’ll be drawings and even sometimes photographs of women in milking machines, like the ones they use for cows.

Lactophiles can be sexually aroused by watching women breastfeed, by the smell of the milk and even by being breastfed themselves. And breastfeeding organisations are well aware that such men exist, because those men call up and treat the service as a phone sex hotline.

Alexis: We have had persistent nuisance calls from men in La Leche League. There’s a guy in the US who is prolific and he will call the mobile phones of the volunteers. And often these men will pretend that they want information for their partner but they really just want to talk to a woman about breastfeeding and they have some kind of sexual experience from that. Oh my god Stassja, he has called like hundreds. And because we’re not like, we don’t have like a hotline or anything so you just put your personal phone number out to promote your meetings and stuff so he’s calling them and it’s so gross, it’s disgusting. And he’s not the only one but he’s like a regular one, he comes back every year and yeah.

Stassja Frei: Despite knowing that these men exist, La Leche League International opened its service to men who say they’re women. From what I can find online, this policy has been in places since at least 2019. Autogynephiles can show up at any meeting. Lactophiles can simply say that they identify as women and gain access to mothers breastfeeding their babies.

Alexis: The thing that makes me so angry is that there are still so many women who do not get breastfeeding support or don’t get good skilled breastfeeding support. To suddenly do a massive u turn and be throwing resources and volunteer time into supporting men who are not physiologically designed- this is not part of their reproductive process. Can we please just finish with the women who want to breastfeed and give them some support?

Stassja Frei: As is so often the case with transgender inclusion, La Leche League’s policy would inevitably lead to the exclusion of actual women. 

Alexis: In terms of mothering there’s an amount of privacy and psychological safety that comes with being in the presence of other women. So if you then add a man I think a lot of women would feel uncomfortable. I think a lot of women would not come back. I think a lot of women would not feel free to talk about what they really need to share or ask. The women who came to my groups, for some of them it was the first time they had ever breastfed outside of their house. When you are breastfeeding, particularly a young baby, it can be quite a clumsy experience where you’re learning and your baby’s learning and it’s the first time both of you have ever breastfed so when you’re trying to get that baby onto the breast there’s an amount of exposure, you know, of your body where a new mother’s just kind of clumsily trying to get their baby on and I can imagine it being so much harder if a man is in the space. And I can imagine it being very uncomfortable for women to do that. And women come to those meetings and the privacy that’s created means that there’s a container where we can talk about how mothering maybe changes your body, changes your sex life, the impact of birth on your body, the unique experience of being a mother. We don’t need or want men there to do that.

Stassja Frei: The fallout from this terrible decision has been incredibly destructive to the organisation.

Alexis: So in 2023 the trustees of La Leche League Great Britain contacted the board of LLL International with concerns about the language being changed, and the board then wrote back to Great Britain leaders saying that all volunteers were obliged to provide breastfeeding support to all nursing parents regardless of their gender identity or sex. Those trustees in the UK have now been suspended for saying that they will not support men to breastfeed and that’s an abuse of power. They have gone to the UK Charity Commission. They have done their legal duty to ensure that the organisation is actually following its charitable goals and they’ve been punished by the international board. So there are all kinds of ways that leaders are protesting and I’m aware that some of these leaders in the UK have stepped away and formed a new organisation but it’s ongoing. Yeah I think they’re really really brave actually.

Stassja Frei: The collapse of La Leche League Great Britain is another story all together which I’m sure in time, UK women will tell in its entirety.

As for La Leche League International…

Alexis: I have heard that the organisation is no longer growing. Trainees are down. People are leaving. Marian left. If the board will listen to volunteers around the world and have some humility and respect the non-American, non-western cultures of the women who are volunteering, then there’s a chance the organisation can come back to its original mission. But overall, the organisation could be diminished. It could be that it’s no longer respected in that global health space because it’s seen as being ideologically driven and not in touch with the needs of mothers in different parts of the world. I feel that there are still a lot of volunteers within the organisation who are holding ground and fighting their corner and that includes on the board. I don’t know what will happen. I really don’t know.

******

Stassja Frei: Coming up in the next episode of Desexing Society, we’ll hear from women who unwittingly entered into relationships with autogynephiles. 

Maggie: And in the storage shed were all the clothes, make up and accessories that any cross dresser would dream for. And I laughed. I just didn’t, couldn’t comprehend it and I didn’t believe him.

Lauren: All the make up that I’d found or that had gone missing from our bathroom. The lingerie that he bought me that I never wore because it would mysteriously disappear. All of that so that he could sit in the bathroom for 2 hours and get dressed up as a female and do whatever he wanted.

Stassja Frei: Thanks for listening to Desexing Society. Written and produced by me, Stassja Frei. Thank you to my script editor, Ms Edie Wyatt, my sound technician Matthew Friend, and to Dr Karleen Gribble and Alexis for appearing in this episode. Thank you also to Milli Hill for the title of this episode. For more information, or to donate towards this project – which I paid for myself – please visit desexingsociety.com