In a world where truth is becoming increasingly stranger than fiction, it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the original founders of La Leche League (LLL) recently resigned from the organization due to, of all things, the inclusion of men in the organization’s mission. In a letter directed to LLL’s senior leadership, Marian Tompson, 94 years old, declared that the group has become “a travesty of my original intent.”

“From an organization with the specific mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them,” Tompson went on, “LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding, despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.”

Meanwhile, Miriam Main, a trustee for LLL in Great Britain, also resigned, stating she is unwilling to assist men to “perform a poor imitation of breastfeeding.”

A poor imitation, indeed. It would be, in fact, laughable, were it not so downright appalling.

As a woman who has breastfed all seven of my biological children, I can personally attest to the fact that breastfeeding is not always easy, particularly when you’re a brand new mother. I’ve never belonged to LLL, but I have benefitted from the wisdom and expertise of a hospital lactation consultant. I’ve been supported by my family and friends by way of encouragement and advice. And that help and support is crucial, because as every new mother knows, it is a special kind of insecurity and panic that sets in when you’re not sure if you’re feeding your newborn correctly, if he or she is getting enough to eat, or if your milk supply is ultimately where it needs to be. Breastfeeding is a beautiful choice but, like most good things in life worth having, it takes commitment, effort, and community support.

I have been a stay-at-home mother all these years, completely free to nurse on demand, when and how I wish. Women who choose breastfeeding while working outside of the home have additional considerations to manage.

Providing Support

So while breastfeeding is a wonderful, convenient, and healthy way for a woman to nourish her baby, if she is able, she cannot be expected to do this alone. Women deserve cultural, social, and clinical support for what is both a natural and occasionally challenging endeavor. A truly humane society will be one in which this particular aspect of womanhood is embraced and celebrated: a body-positivity movement of the most vital and important kind, where women receive not only a beautiful vision for the benefits of breastfeeding but also meaningful, practical help.   

‘Chestfeeding’ is Preposterous

The notion of men invading these formerly safe spaces (both physically in terms of attendance at LLL support group meetings but also figuratively, in terms of how breastfeeding is now being conceptualized as “chestfeeding” and something not exclusive to womanhood) and appropriating this deeply feminine and sacred activity so rooted in the very biology and makeup of women, is both disturbing and preposterous.

Regardless of your preferred pronouns, the way you dress, or the name you go by, the truth is that it is exclusively women who bear the potentiality for breastfeeding. And for pregnancy. And for childbirth. It is both a profound gift and a strangely beautiful burden. To suggest otherwise is not only ridiculous, but completely, objectively offensive to women. Men simply cannot know, as the celebrated journalist and writer Joan Didion once famously wrote in her scathing critique of the modern women’s movement, “what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it — that sense of living one’s deepest life under water, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death.”

Women Must Stand Up

Any woman who considers herself a feminist, or at the very least a woman generally concerned for the interests of women, ought to not only recognize that this impulse to appropriate women’s biology is a destructive force in society that must be stopped. They must also see that the only way to stop it is for women to be bold and to fight back. Gender-identity politics has subsumed the feminist movement (and the gay rights movement too, for that matter), twisting things so that women are being oppressed and taken advantage of on a scale scarcely imaginable when LLL was first formed in 1956.

We must call LLL’s latest policy shift what it is: a terrible breach of decency and modesty, and a violation of one of the most integral parts of being a woman. It is not, as LLL International’s executive director Zion Tankard claims, a matter of upholding “the values of empathy and understanding” — quite the opposite. Society should have no empathy for men who invade the private spaces of breastfeeding women, and who put babies at risk by their errant behavior.

Does this make for uncomfortable conversation? Probably. Women aren’t supposed to complain, after all, when men are undressing in their locker rooms or mocking them in a sexually caricatured way onstage for money, and calling it drag. But when will women have had enough? When will women decide that this egregious form of misogyny and injustice is simply no longer acceptable?

“This shift from following the norms of nature,” Tompson wrote in her resignation letter, “which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organization.”  

But if only it were just the LLL organization being destroyed by this twisted indulging of adult fantasies: The very fabric of society is under attack by gender-identity activists who, among other things, wish to erase women. This widespread assault on women’s rights, women’s privacy, and women’s potentiality for motherhood is destructive to women, children, and men alike. It’s time to speak up. And I’ll do my part by standing up and saying that breastfeeding is for women and their babies. And they deserve our support.