What a Male Breastfeeding Image Reveals About the Transgender Movement

Conservatives may be tempted to laugh at the absurdity of a breastfeeding organization featuring a man attached to breast pumps, but we shouldn’t simply move on—it reveals something important about the effect of transgenderism on America’s institutions.

First, what happened? The Maine State Breastfeeding Coalition, an organization dedicated to advocacy and training on lactation, in a social media post for National Breastfeeding Month featured the image of man attempting to breastfeed. After the conservative X account Libs of TikTok highlighted the image, the coalition apparently deleted it on Facebook but kept it up on Instagram.

The image reads, “Celebrating trans lactation, two-spirit & chestfeeding.” The Instagram post declares, “We’re proud to celebrate and uplift trans lactation, chestfeeding, and Two-Spirit families during National Breastfeeding Month.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Maine State Breastfeeding Coalition (@mainebreastfeeds)

The post emphasizes “inclusive spaces” and declares that “every family deserves affirming, respectful, and evidence-based care.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the Maine State Breastfeeding Coalition, asking for any scientific studies demonstrating that male lactation can feed babies. The coalition did not provide a response.

Before delving into the incentives behind the post, I’d like to address briefly what happened here.

A state organization that claims to be dedicated to supporting human lactation—the process by which mothers provide infants with life-giving sustenance—promoted the notion of forcing babies to rely on males, who cannot provide enough calories to keep infants alive.

Activists have touted a few instances where men have secreted milk-like substances through their nipples. Yet, as Talia Nava at The Paradox Institute explained, it requires unsafe levels of drugs—which are passed through milk to babies—just to get men to produce a small amount of liquid, far less than babies need.

Most of us intuitively grasp that there is no point in trying to force men’s bodies to do something that women’s bodies are programmed for.

So, if the coalition does not readily have evidence for the effectiveness of male breastfeeding—the phenomenon Orwellianly named “chestfeeding” or “trans lactation”—why, on God’s green earth, did they promote it?

The coalition did not choose this image because male lactation is common or because most breastfeeding families face this issue. The image serves another purpose: signaling allegiance to a broader ideological project.

While the social stigma of opposing transgender ideology has increasingly diminished in recent years, many elite institutions still treat support for it as a marker of social responsibility.

According to transgender ideology, human beings have a gender identity that—on some undefined mystical plane—is somehow more real than our biological sex.

Transgender activists frame their demands to recognize one’s gender identity as a matter of politeness. In reality, these demands represent an attempt to force society to adopt the highly controversial view that our biological sex is interchangeable.

It’s not just that this is false. The ideology’s downstream effects—such as men allowed to enter women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and prisons, just by claiming to “identify” as women—are obvious and dangerous.

Furthermore, the claims are also patently absurd, and few images quite capture the absurdity as well as the man “chestfeeding” in Maine, with a smile on his face and a coffee mug in hand reading, “Milk Makes Families.” To think about that slogan is to realize how inane it is.

This image isn’t going to entice men into attempting lactation. Rather, it reveals how institutional leaders feel compelled to subordinate their core missions to ideological signaling that arguably undermines them.

A breastfeeding coalition should exist to help mothers feed babies. When it starts promoting the daft idea of “trans lactation,” it makes itself a laughing stock. Hopefully, this example will convince more leaders that the costs of kowtowing to this ideology far outweigh the rapidly diminishing benefits.