The trans debate

[Hoover Attack]

You’re right Hoover Attack, but also kind of naive about it - I wasn’t joking when I suggested RTW should maybe read some experiences of women who have been married to heterosexual men who came out as trans.

Would it shock you to hear that it emerges as compulsive behaviour, often sexual in nature,

Not sure I’d say it would shock me, but it would surprise me. That’s why I said i would expect most men that want to breast feed are doing it for non-pervy reasons.

[Story of O]

Is it possible for trans women to breast feed?

[Long slender neck]

C they just want to feed their child and contribute to their care

But they can’t because they’re male.

Looks like they can with these drugs. I think its a bit over the top considering there are easier options like formula available

[CEB]

They can excrete a small amount of a substance from their nipples that is far less nutritious than breast milk, the risks of which are not fully known.

So if you mean “can they breastfeed?” in the same spirit as saying “could you make a pizza with a processed cheese slice from the company I work for that I’ll have to drive much further away to get than if I just bought some mozzarella, and pay much more for it, mainly so I can say I supplied the cheese for this pizza?” then the answer is “uh, well I suppose technically, but who benefits here from calling it that and trying to normalise it?”

[Long slender neck]

I see, so it's a bit pointless for baby?

[CEB]

Yes. There’s no benefit for the child. It’s another of those “wrong way round” things where because it’s happening, and an activism is publicly advocating for it, people assume “this can’t just be for the validation of men who even put their own validation ahead of the importance of mother and baby bonding through breast feeding and the child’s health, can it?”

But it is

[Hoover Attack]

What are the family set ups where this is happening? I'd assumed we're talking about those without female mums involved.

[CEB]

The dynamics vary, but overwhelmingly, we are discussing heterosexual male people with female partners, who have fathered children, who redefine themselves and their partners as lesbians, and who demand the right to be a mother, not a father, with all that that entails (breastfeeding is just the latest example to hit mainstream discourse, but it’s been a thing for a while. The difference between how it’s discussed in trans specific spaces, and how it’s discussed when trying to convince people it’s fine is… interesting)

Anything that is considered female specific is something that heterosexual men who identify as women demand for themselves.
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a male writer for Teen Vogue tell a woman that he’d happily rip the womb from a TERF’s corpse so that it could go to someone who actually deserves it…

[Proposition Joe]

discussing heterosexual male people with female partners, who have fathered children, who redefine themselves and their partners as lesbians

So if I turn round tomorrow and say I want to live as a woman, I also have to let Mrs PJ know that she's now a lesbian? Seems a bit unfair.

Also seems odd that breastfeeding is being pushed as an inherent symbol of womanhood/motherhood. Plenty of women struggle to breastfeed and already have to deal with sh*t about 'breast is best', or being made to feel like a failure or a crap Mum, when often nothing could be further from the truth. If you do want to transition, being able to breastfeed doesn't seem like it's a hill to die on and if it is, its highly likely to be hurtful to others.

[Long slender neck]

Not to turn this into The Breastfeeding Debate but strange how the struggle seems to mostly affect women in the western world.

[Proposition Joe]

Not to turn this into The Breastfeeding Debate but strange how the struggle seems to mostly affect women in the western world.

Not arguing the point, but is there any research/evidence on this?

[CEB]

Btw, the stats that show that my veil slipped…

Based on a freedom of information request made of the ministry of justice in 2020 by a women’s rights group, based on the most recent available data.

76 of the 129 male born offenders who identify as transgender (not counting those with gender recognition certificates because the data records them as female, with no clarifying notes) have at least 1 conviction for sexual offences, including 36 for rape and 10 for attempted rape.


76 sex offenders out of 129 male people asserting they are trans women - 58% sex offenders
125 sex offenders out of 3812 women in prison - 3.3%
13234 sex offenders out of 78781 men in prison - 16.8%

(it’s unclear whether any of the 125 women in prison for sexual offences are male people with a GRC, for the reason mentioned above - yep; we don’t know how many women sex offenders are male)

If you extrapolate those statistics to the general population on the conservative assumption that all sex offenders have been caught (that is, you look at the number of inmates as a percentage of the demographic as a whole)
you get this:

Women - 3 per million
Men - 315 per million
Men who identify as women - 1916 per million


Which is not to say that all men with a trans identity are a risk: it’s to say that they pose a risk that is far more similar to the risk posed by the group “male people” (not surprising, as they are male) than the group “female people”, and so as a result, a civil rights movement that seeks to enshrine in law that male people who claim a female identity should be treated as if they pose the same risk to female people as female people, is obviously significantly flawed.

The way I’d interpret the data is that an inadvertant but taboo side effect of the push for trans rights is that all those men that we all knew existed until very recently who had a fetishistic interest in appropriating an extreme version of femininity for themselves have found a perfect context in which to present themselves as vulnerable rather than predatory, and with plenty of useful idiots willing to pretend not to see what is clear.

[CEB]

(one side effect of self ID, if it came in, is that such stats would cease to be available, as only the gender identity a prisoner wanted to be recorded would be recorded)

[Proposition Joe]

There'd be 1916000000 trans sex offenders in a population of 67000000?

[Proposition Joe]

Ah, edited.

[Long slender neck]

Not to turn this into The Breastfeeding Debate but strange how the struggle seems to mostly affect women in the western world.

Not arguing the point, but is there any research/evidence on this?

I believe the countries with lowest bf rates are all western ones. I guess some countries don't have the luxury of choice and attitudes may be different too.

[Hoover Attack]

Are we really going to trust CEB with these calculations?

[CEB]

I avoided probability quite well, to be fair

[CEB]

Turns out that the “study” that’s led to this iteration of the story (and the claims that breast milk from transwomen is safe and as nutritious as milk from women) featured just *one* transwoman, who supplied the milk himself, it was not witnessed, nor were his samples checked/verified/analysed for anything verifying it came from him, nor was it checked for antibodies that would demonstrate it came from the biological mother of the baby, and came from a household where there was, weirdly enough, a lactating woman living at the time.

LOL. My veil slips again as I say “hmmmm, I wonder what happened here?”

I wonder if anyone (here or elsewhere) who jumped to “and why is this not a good idea? What’s wrong with males breastfeeding, exactly, eh?” will reflect on how quickly they took up an opinion based on what seemed the most progressive, rather than the most sane?

[Hoover Attack]

Did anyone jump to that conclusion?

[Rich Tea Wellin]

Did anyone jump to that conclusion?

This “debate” thread is about 20% useful info and insight and 80% paranoia, and jumping to conclusion on what people actually said. There’s literally 0 debate. Echo chamber in the extreme as in it’s the same person agreeing with themselves. It’s probably quite a good study on dogma, actually

[CEB]

“There’s zero debate”

Says man whose response to actual stats was “as I say, the veil slips” and who took the breast feeding story at face value.

Feel free to tell me a single assertion I’ve made about the substance of mainstream trans activism that isn’t verifiable.

Or say “the veil slips” or “game day - must dash”

[Long slender neck]

Thought it was based on something a Sussex nhs trust had said?

[CEB]

Thought it was based on something a Sussex nhs trust had said?

It was - but they said it based on this one study, which featured *one* male person’s submitted nipple excretions, which was not tested for anything that would show that it was identifiably from him (wasn’t even tested for presence of the hormones he would have taken to induce “lactation”), there was no independent verification that he was providing the milk, and it came from a household where there was an actual lactating woman present.

It *could* all be above board, and it’s actually the case that this one male person’s unverified sample demonstrates that male people’s “breast milk” is as good as that from women (I know what my money is on though) but the point is that all scrutiny goes out of the window when it comes to this. We should be able to trust what an NHS trust says.

Now for the “paranoia” bit (or legitimate thinking through) - *if* it were the case that the one male person in this study *did* use milk from a woman, with the aim of validating the idea that men can breast feed, what does that say about for whose benefit he would like men to be able to breast feed?

[CEB]

Also, the stories have been framed misleadingly.

Here’s an example - from the evening standard

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/ ... 40073.html

Quoting a relevant bit:
“A leaked letter from a University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust medical director said milk produced by trans-women, with the help of drugs, is “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby”.

But the letter didn’t actually say that. The study in question featured 4 female people (including one woman who identified as a man) and one male person - the transwoman about whom I’m doubting the veracity of the submission - and the letter actually said that it’s the milk produced by *the cohort of participants in whom lactation was induced* that was comparable to natural milk; not specifically “milk produced by trans women”.

Interestingly, the decision to refer to what is produced in men was a political decision made before the fact, not based on anything verified that suggests that what men produce is “milk”, but a decision to refer to all secretions produced by people who wish to breastfeed as milk, in order to be gender neutral.


Basically, you kind of have to care enough about the little itch of “this doesn’t seem likely” to then read past the euphemisms and the assumptions, but once you do, you’re pretty much always left with “f***, that’s actually what happened?”