The stigmatization of transfem parenting is an expression of fascist eugenic reasoning.
Raising children is one of the most wonderful things I’ve been privileged to do. It’s cheesy but one of the things that really gutted me growing up and being trans was knowing that I would never carry children and may never become a parent. Obviously this is different for many people. Lots of trans people never want to be parents. But as the oldest child of 5, I took a lot of pride growing up in helping look after my siblings. I was always really passionate about kids. I was painfully broody in my teens thinking about how transition was going to make my chances of becoming a parent much much harder. I’d lay up at night crying about it.
I didn’t breastfeed my kids. They were old enough by the time I became their spare mum that it wasn’t really relevant. I don’t lament this — they did just fine without it. But I would have been happy to have breastfed them if I had been around and when I see trans women breastfeeding I feel joy for them and for their babies, that they have the courage to feed their kids. There’s something really sick about the attempts to stigmatise this. For trans women, breastfeeding is enabled usually by hormonal induction, through the Newman-Goldfarb Protocol. This process produces nutritious healthy milk for the baby to feed on, and ensures access to a range of easy to digest fats, sugars, immunoglobulins and antibodies not available via baby formula, without allergens that are present in some baby formulas. Breast milk is good for babies. It’s what they’ve evolved to digest most readily, and breast milk from trans women is still breast milk!
I honestly despair at the wild array of hatred from conservative former feminists like Julie Bindel who have called for a trans woman to be arrested for feeding her child (when it’s one of the key responsibilities of any parent to do so). It chills me to the core. The way people have been responding to news of a trans woman breastfeeding a child has been almost as if our transition leaves us with venomous sacs cunningly disguised as breasts to suckle unsuspecting infants on and poison them. The historic mythology of witches nursing animal familiars was raised by one person as a family resemblence to this mythology of trans women poisoning babies with our breasts.
These narratives are inherently dehumanising. Trans women’s breasts aren’t especially sexual, nor are they especially corrupt or perverse. They’re fatty tissue and mammary glands, and the fetishisation of them (quite literally imbuing with with magically evil properties disregarding their quite mundane function in helping nourish and raise a baby) belongs entirely to the beholder. To an infant a tit is just a tit, and milk is just milk.
These people want us dead. They want our children taken away. They want us locked up. They say so frequently out loud without the slightest hesitation. This is a threat to our human rights to a family life, to reproductive autonomy and most importantly a threat to the health and nutrition of our children. I despair.
