The eye of the beholder
Can men lactate enough to nurse an infant?
Or, it’s a man putting his kink ahead of the health of an infant.
The NY Times looked into it in 2019:
Is it possible for a man to breastfeed a baby? For millennia, this question has tickled people’s imagination. It has intrigued; it has disgusted; it has also remained largely hypothetical.
That is, until last year, when a peer-reviewed case report confirmed that a transgender woman, assigned male at birth, was able to breastfeed her child after she was put on a regimen of hormonal drugs. Weeks before the baby’s birth, she was able to produce eight ounces of milk per day, and for the first six weeks, the baby could be sustained solely on that milk alone.
But, onlookers wonder, is that regimen of hormonal drugs good for the baby? Do the drugs get into the milk?
Before the treatment, the patient had been receiving feminizing hormones for six years. We don’t know how long it would take for a cis man to induce functional lactation. But “we have a pretty good idea of the types of hormone cocktails that would be needed,” said Tamar Reisman, an endocrinologist with the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery and one of the two authors of the case report.
And are hormone cocktails good for babies? Is anyone even bothering to find out?
But if TWAW, how does this teach us anything male lactation? Checkmate, TRAs!
Sometimes dudes lactate spontaneously and what they produce is the same as what women produce. Men have all the necessary parts required to lactate. They just don’t lactate unless something’s wrong.
No doubt males who do this are doing so for their own reasons and not to benefit the baby. Same as women pumping themselves full of meds in the hopes of breastfeeding an adopted baby so they can feel validated as the kid’s mother. They take the same drugs prescribed to women who don’t produce sufficient milk tho, which don’t harm babies. The infant’s health isn’t compromised but they do rely primarily on formula. Unless the person doing the breastfeeding has been pregnant and breastfed before, these treatments don’t yield volumes of milk comparable to those of someone lactating following pregnancy.
When I had my kids and watched my wife do all that breasfeeding work, while the rest of the work was shared, I joked with her that pretty soon medical science would develop a treatment to make men lactate, so we could share that work too. (no kink involved).
“We don’t know how long it would take for a cis man to induce functional lactation.”
And… so? We don’t actually know how long it would take for a TIM, either. *shrug* damned prohibitions against truly blinded (I.e., uninformed) human experimentation…
Regardless, their dramatic claims are wildly overstated (as per usual, sigh): “Don’t normally lactate, possess underdeveloped breast tissue, normally lack the hormone required for its development” *is* basic biology. Just because they don’t understand the nuance and precision their instructors used doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t. But sure, imagine yourself to be some sort of medical miracle *eyeroll* Colour me underwhelmed.
(That being said, I’m not entirely convinced the hormones they use are safe for babies… if they’re using the same molecules as endogenous progesterone, oxytocin, and estradiol that’s one thing, but AFAIK regular HRT hormones are often analogues that bind to the correct receptors, but aren’t actually exactly the same molecules. I’m not familiar enough with research into HRT hormone analogues in breast milk and any of their effects on infant development to say one way or the other.)
A quick googling suggests that 8oz per day would not be enough for even a newborn.
I recall reading a long time ago, that one of the Norse sagas told of an incident where a woman gave birth & died shortly thereafter. She was the only woman in an isolated party travelling & the father of the baby cut his nipple & had the baby suck the blood until the father started lactating.
I’m doubt the father identified as trans.