Common sense be damned, the message being sent by peak health bodies across the Western world is that the needs of children are of little consequence, so long as the adults in the picture are gratified.
"In his popular work Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote:
To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.
"Now, more than three decades after Lasch wrote those words, the consequences of this culture of narcissism are bearing rotten fruit. And no one is paying the price more than children.
"We need look no further than the news last week revealing that a trust of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) claimed that the nipple secretions of transgender-identifying men were “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby.”
"The trust has previously advertised its pride in pioneering within the NHS vocabulary like “chestfeeding” instead of breastfeeding and “birthing parent” instead of mother.
"Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released guidance last July saying, “transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).”
"What these medical bodies are far more reluctant to admit is the cocktail of drugs required to induce this “chestfeeding,” in addition to any hormone therapy already being undertaken by the adult in question. As highlighted by The Telegraph:
For a person born male to breastfeed, they must develop milk-producing glands by taking the hormone progestin.
A drug is required to lactate, such as domperidone, which is often prescribed to women struggling to breastfeed, and helps to stimulate the production of prolactin – a separate hormone that tells the body to produce milk. . . .