how people self-identify dates back to 2004.
Now LLLGB, the UK charity under the LLL umbrella, is in the thick of the battle. Until recently a majority of its trustees had been fighting to remain true to the organisation’s founding mission. They came under fire from a minority of local leaders who support male lactation, and from LLL International, which accused them of challenging LLL policy publicly in a disparaging manner. In May it suspended them as leaders, which meant they could no longer hold meetings. They allege this left the women they had been working with unsupported and put their positions on the charity’s board in doubt.
At the beginning of this month one of their number, Miriam Main, resigned. In her resignation note she spoke of “bullying, lies and cruelty of recent times”. And on November 16 the other trustees allied with her were removed by a vote of UK-based leaders.
What makes this not just a tragedy but a scandal is that UK law is clear that no male person is a “mother”. Even a gender recognition certificate, the paperwork that changes a person’s recorded sex for certain administrative purposes, doesn’t change a person’s legal status from being a father to a mother, or vice versa. Since LLLGB was set up to support “mothers”, its trustees were simply doing their job when they refused to support male lactation.
The women I spoke to for this article expressed grief and betrayal at seeing the organisation they love buy into an ideology that denies biological reality and harms mothers and babies. But they also see hope among the wreckage. Breastfeeding rarely makes the headlines, and though this row has been surreal and painful it gives an opportunity to tell the world about its importance and unites them in their determination to recreate what was destroyed.
Of all the victories of the gender cult, this has to be one of the most astonishing. How on earth have the women who run La Leche League become so transfixed by the need to indulge men in their sexualised breastfeeding fantasies?
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