The eye of the beholder

Can men lactate enough to nurse an infant?

https://twitter.com/AnaOpp/status/1526960135012327425

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?

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