Medicine is rooted in science. Doctors, nurses and midwives train for years, learning about the human body and how it operates. One thing that’s absolutely clear is that only women can breastfeed. Yet the NHS has been accused of allowing midwives to be “trained” by a trans organisation which promotes male breastfeeding.

An outfit called the Queer Birth Club offers “LGBTQ+” lactation classes, promoted via the slogan “birthing people ain’t all women”. According to a report in the Telegraph, it has provided training sessions for NHS England and several NHS trusts. Its founder AJ Silver identifies as non-binary and has spoken at conferences organised by the Royal College of Midwives, claiming to have trained more than 600 “birth professionals”. The paper added that a nurse who raised concerns about the training is now facing disciplinary action.

Two weeks ago, the club held one of its regular “LGBTQ+ competency in lactation workshops”, covering such subjects as “inducing lactation, feeding after top surgery, hormones, and co-nursing”. Translated into normal language, this means using powerful drugs to induce a simulacrum of breast milk in men who claim to be women. It also means inducing lactation in women who have had their breasts amputated.

How could the NHS be so gullible? How could midwives, of all people, fall for this nonsense? Their prime responsibility is to women and children, yet it’s striking that infants barely feature on the club’s pastel-themed website, which claims to be “amplifying the voices of the often overlooked and invisible minorities in the birthing world”. The most invisible minority in its pitch, however, is babies.

That’s because male breastfeeding is an adult predilection, in which infants are co-opted to affirm the lie that men can become women. It’s a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist, evidenced by the fact that human beings were born and breastfed by women for thousands of years. No one suggested that men being unable to produce breast milk was an issue until about a decade ago, when the demands of trans-identified males began to distort just about every aspect of human life.

Babies’ health appears to be a non-existent consideration when a man wants to preen about his ability to breastfeed, even though he can only do it by taking an anti-nausea drug called domperidone. It is not approved to encourage lactation anywhere in the world, and the US Food and Drug Administration warns that it “is excreted in breast milk and could expose a breastfeeding infant to unknown risks”.

The NHS is in the middle of a financial crisis, leaving patients stuck on waiting lists for months if not years. The Queer Birth Club’s workshops are not free: it offers “tiered pricing for anybody working in the NHS, members of the LGBTQ+ community, those from historically excluded communities and more”. Health Secretary Wes Streeting needs to ask urgent questions about whether the NHS is funding participation in what is effectively “queer” propaganda — and whether health professionals are encouraging “off-label” prescriptions of lactation-inducing drugs as a result.

Politicians have become so used to appeasing the trans lobby that they rarely ask how trans women can simultaneously be the most oppressed demographic and one that gets everything it wants. But using newborn infants to satisfy a male fetish is surely a line that should not be crossed.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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