The idea of lactating men reminds me of a saying I can’t exactly quote verbatim, but it has something to do with how much sense there is with regard to mammary glands on a bull, if you take my meaning. As in – welcome to a bizarro world where that has become a gender slur.
Of course, you can have T**s on a bull, you bigot, but they may discover that inducing lactation creates challenges for Bos taurus, and not just because “Significant research gaps exist in this field.”
That’s the opinion of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine Protocol—no mention of whether it is acceptable for lactating men to chest-feed on a commercial flight. I’m guessing that is another significant gap in the research. But they are otherwise confident enough about the topic to issue a 12-page paper titled “ABM Clinical Protocol #33: Lactation Care for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Plus Patients.”
A central goal of The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine is the development of clinical protocols for managing common medical problems that may impact breastfeeding success. These protocols serve only as guidelines for the care of breastfeeding mothers and infants and do not delineate an exclusive course of treatment or serve as standards of medical care. Variations in treatment may be appropriate according to the needs of an individual patient.
Breasts and breastmilk seem to me to be the two biggest hurdles which, as it turns out, the science has yet to resolve when it comes to men who think they might be women. The paper gets to those “issues” after spending several pages on definitions and language so as not to offend anyone.
Seriously.
Women who think they might be men but who want to breastfeed (presumably a child) are encouraged to wait until after they are done doing that before having extensive hormone or surgical treatment. Translation: if you chop off your breasts, you can’t breastfeed.
Good advice. But not good enough to stop them from fantasizing about the other side of the social construct we call the gender spectrum; men who think they might be women that want to breastfeed. There are lots of words and speculation, but at the end of the day, good luck with that, mostly because … there just hasn’t been enough research directed at the problem. It’s not a biology problem. It is a money problem.
It’s not beyond the pale, you see; they just need bigger Grants. Not guys named Grant but cash, dollars, scratch, dough, clams, or dineros. The proper funding will miraculously present solutions to the problem of … the diminished lifestyles of scientists who write these sorts of papers.
It’s all quite nutty, so allow me to summarize how you might respond to a debate on this topic.
I think that sums it up.
HT | TGP