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AIBU

I wasn’t a Birthing Person and I didn’t Chest Feed

(277 Posts)
Oopsadaisy1 Wed 10-Feb-21 08:11:38

I am a Mother and I breast fed my daughters.

AIBU to expect Mother’s to continue to Breast Feed their babies if they want to?

The world is going mad and if I’m unreasonable to be ‘woke’ then in answer to my own question then NIANBU.

This is of course my reaction to new instructions to Midwives in Parts of the UK.

FarNorth Sat 13-Feb-21 20:55:10

NellG I don't care what hormones anyone wants to consume - unless it might affect a baby, who gets no say in it.
Have you heard of any research into the health of babies / children who have been chestfed by trans people?

Fennel Sat 13-Feb-21 20:38:35

Thanks Nellg very interesting.

PECS Sat 13-Feb-21 20:32:18

Trisher I don't care what name any parent wants to call themselves.. I do not want others to dictate the language I want to use about myself, my body and its functions. That seems fair to me.

NellG Sat 13-Feb-21 20:27:35

As men possess the same breast tissue, including ducts etc it is perfectly possible for them to breast feed- if difficult due to the lack of breast development during puberty. Various hormones could stimulate milk production but whether it would match female breast milk in quality is debatable.

There are a couple of conditions which cause men to spontaneously produce small quantities of breast milk which have nothing to do with being trans or receiving hormones that aren't produced outside the body. Men and women possess the same hormones on the whole, just in different prevailing quantities.

Besides, what's the big deal with taking hormones? On the whole women don't seem to be too strung out about taking male hormones as part of HRT - testosterone gel boosts libido. Neither, when we take HRT, are most women too concerned about messing with 'nature'.

So, us women aren't too fussed about accommodating these things when it suits us, but are quite happy to condemn it when it doesn't...

trisher Sat 13-Feb-21 20:04:56

FarNorth smash the system then and stop picking on the victims of patriachy.

Fennel Sat 13-Feb-21 20:04:56

That's an interesting article FarNorth - I was wondering about it myself but have been offline the last 24 hours.
A member of our family couldn't have children so they adopted and with great perseverence she was able to breastfeed.
So I thought , if a born man changes to a woman would the extra hormones enable him/her to produce milk for the baby?

trisher Sat 13-Feb-21 20:01:55

FarNort someone who wants to be called "mother" (Ialways hated it when staff did that to me I felt it was lazy and they couldn't be bothered to learn my name) can be, But if a transman gives birth they may not want to be called "mother". Why would you insist they must be?

Callistemon Sat 13-Feb-21 19:55:46

Excellent posts in response to LizziesMom ?

FarNorth Sat 13-Feb-21 19:26:49

Mothers who want to be called mothers are being told they must be birthers or breeders or incubators. No-one is respecting their right to choose what they are called.

trisher Sat 13-Feb-21 19:11:03

You, as has been said, can call yourself any thing you wish. But you should respect the right of other people to be called what they want as well. And if you haven't read the whole thread ths is very little to do with transwomen and everything to do with transmen.
FarNorth I doubt there is very much which rich white men don't profit from. In fact they are taking more and more of the world's wealth worldwide. Oxfam say that proper taxation and. investment in public services would help to close the gap but I'm not holding my breath for that .https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/three-ways-to-stop-global-economic-system-working-only-for-rich-white-men/
But why do you think radical feminists want the patriachy smashed? We know who the real enemy is and it's not transpeople

FarNorth Sat 13-Feb-21 19:08:51

Here's an article from 2017 about inducing lactation in a transwoman (man).

This is something that some transwomen (men), and their supporters, are very keen to have happening.

(More lucrative pharmaceuticals required, of course, trisher)

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779241/

Bear in mind that when the person is referred to as 'she / her' this is a male person being described.

Chewbacca Sat 13-Feb-21 19:02:37

grin FarNorth, excellent post.

FarNorth Sat 13-Feb-21 18:56:09

trisher Rich white men are indeed providing money to this, and profiting from drugs and surgery being sold to trans people.
That's got nothing to do with people in the 80s.

FarNorth Sat 13-Feb-21 18:53:06

LizziesMom it's only very recently that women have been called 'incubators', 'chest feeders', 'cervix havers' etc.
Trans activists and their supporters are the ones reducing women to their physical parts.
The 'grannies' and 'boomers' you are decrying know full well that women are whatever they want to be but they also know full well what a biological woman is.

Hop back into your cradle and don't try to teach grannies to suck eggs.

Bridgeit Sat 13-Feb-21 17:57:03

Everything on Earth , procreates.
A circle will still be a circle even if you wish to call it a square.
Renaming, denying , identifying ,describing will not alter the fundamentals of procreation.
Breasts are appendages on adult female human’s chests with the inbuilt plumbing to feed a new born human baby .At this moment in time Males of the species do not have aforementioned plumbing.
No doubt this will change over time ,until then I’m putting my money on worms as the front runners in the survival stakes !

PECS Sat 13-Feb-21 17:49:13

Lizziesmom I know that many of the women here were on the streets marching for equality, at Greenham, demanding changes to Clause 28, pushing that glass ceiling, workplace injustice fighting sexism and sexual harassment. Some of us are now XRs.

Your tone implies some kind of bitterness towards older people as if we were one homogenous group. We are not.

None of us choose a time to be born so if we are baby boomers or generation x etc. is a matter of accident.

I have had a long and successful professional career and am immensely pleased to have also been a strong and effective co-parent to my two children. But I did give birth to them and I did breast feed them and it is a part of my life that I value strongly. I do not want men or women dictating to me how I describe my life experience so it fits someone else's agenda.

Elegran Sat 13-Feb-21 17:30:54

LizziesMom carrying, giving birth to and nurturing babies is just one of the things that women are good at, and also, almost incidentally, it is one which men are absolutely incapable of. So if it appears that men are trying to control the words used to describe those processes then is it surprising that women are not pleased? If women footballers wanted to alter the terms used in a match when they were playing it, men would then say that it wasn't the same game,

It seems that it is only when they (men) are doing their version of the processes that they want a new set of words, but that wasn't obvious at first, hence reactions were instinctive and protective.

PECS Sat 13-Feb-21 17:22:42

I have one chest and two breasts! I have a vagina and birthed my babies through this birth canal.
I do really not care if people choose to live differently to the way they were biologically born but please do not undermine, or dictate to me, how I describe my life experience.
If you do not have breasts or mammary glands that produce milk you cannot feed a baby except by bottle.

Callistemon Sat 13-Feb-21 17:22:29

Patronising and very rude post, Lizziesmum
And extremely uninformed too.

Chewbacca Sat 13-Feb-21 17:16:28

But your grandchildren will thank you for not being so offended

Not what they seem to be saying on Mumsnet Lizziesmum.

Galaxy Sat 13-Feb-21 17:16:16

Could you be more patronising.

LizziesMom Sat 13-Feb-21 17:11:57

Wow a lot of grannies are up in arms about this issue that affects them in no way shape or form. Do you really inky value yourself based on your ability to reproduce offspring or produce milk? So stop reducing females to "incubators" aka internalized misogyny and/or the outdated patriarchy. Women are more than breeders! Cultures change and people change. We all should accept that and go with the flow. I know it's hard as most of you ladies are likely of the baby boomer/generation X and change is not your strong suit. But your grandchildren will thank you for not being so offended.

Granarchist Fri 12-Feb-21 18:55:20

its also dumbing down which really gets to me. A friend was visited soon after delivering her baby. The doctor introduced himself as 'the baby doctor". Obviously the word paediatrician was too difficult for the new mother. The new mother was a veterinary surgeon and less than impressed by being patronised.

Doodledog Fri 12-Feb-21 18:37:02

NellG

Oh for goodness sake Doodledog I was making point regarding the loaded rhetoric around this issue - not personally calling anyone phobic. Quite frankly much as I find the debate interesting and am happy to support trans rights both on here and in RL the hysteria (you know the word, etymology 'of the womb' from the Greek...) on here about it is tedious to the nth degree. But if you want to read the dictionary to me, crack on.

The concept of civilised debate has clearly passed some of you by. Most of you undo your own arguments within the same paragraph!

MBHPI Well, plenty of them act like knobs already so why the hell not? wink

I wasn't saying that you were accusing anyone. I was pointing out that if someone can be called 'all kinds of phobic' for confusing cross-dressing with transsexuality (and yes, I know the difference), then the word is being bandied about without due care.

You have called me phobic (IMO an offensive thing to say) because I have concerns about the way in which women are being erased as a sex and about the threat to female-only spaces, and I was pointing out that this is also a fallacious accusation.

Please tell me how that is hysterical, and who you are accusing of undoing their own arguments in a paragraph? Pointed yet unspecified accusations don't really get debates very far.

trisher Fri 12-Feb-21 18:35:40

I advise anyone who thinks this is a white man's campaign to watch "Pose" or "Paris is Burning" about the culture in the 1980s which was dominated by black, Hispanic and mixed race non-conforming people and that was in the 1980s