The Great Man-Boob controversy

God, this is a weird island, isn’t it?

Confession: As the proud owner of a modestly sized pair of what some have uncharitably over the years referred to as “man boobs”, I was unaware entirely until last week that, given the right cocktail of gender-bending drugs, I could lactate.

Apparently, some oddball men take such drugs and choose to produce something approximating breastmilk for sexual pleasure. That is at least just some freaky-deaky sexual weirdness from America, which is the world’s foremost exporter of freaky-deaky sexual weirdness.

Much more concerningly, apparently some of these men actually make themselves lactate to feed children. Actual real human children.

That I – and you (sorry) – are now aware of this information is of course thanks to the HSE, which we all fund with our taxes. As the story goes, the HSE was due to fund a conference on Breastfeeding, and decided to invite a chap called Jacob Englesman, one of whose specialities, it seems, is “inducing lactation for kinksters”, which in practical terms means giving men drugs so that they produce something that they then call milk, from their nipples.

Englesmann was due to speak on the topic of “lactation support for gender diverse families”, where presumably this skill of his would come in handy – the obvious and correct implication being that he was going to teach men how to produce milk from their manboobs for the consumption of actual human children. Because equality, and because progressive. And because anything about equality and progressive is good and wise.

That this produced outrage is not shocking. That the conference is now reportedly paused is not shocking either. What will follow will be the usual god-that’s-shocking-it’s-right-it-was-stopped from the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael backbenchers who venture a comment on the matter. But what will be missing is any analysis or admission as to why the invitation was issued in the first place.

We must begin as ever with the underlying mindset in Ireland which is that having children is a right to which there must be equal access, regardless of one’s own choices. Or in plain terms, that gay and lesbian people must have the right to have children despite the rather obvious fact that their sexual preferences are an inherent biological bar to reproduction. It used to be that to become a biological parent, one was required to engage in activities of a sinful nature with a member of the opposite sex. This was not optional. Now it is, as it must be because were it otherwise, then gays and straights would not be equal.

But what follows from that is obvious too: If one has the right to become a parent, then one must surely have the right to the full range of experiences of parenthood. It’s the same mindset as marriage equality, where the notion was that even fully legal and recognized gay relationships would not be on the same level without extending marriage. Well, how can parenting be fully equal if one couple gets to experience breastfeeding, and another does not?

Thus, in the progressive and equal world, there is space for Englesmann, whose job it is to make sure biological men can feed children whatever kind of chemically altered substance that leaks from their man-boobs after his interventions, and call it milk. And this is the kind of thing that the HSE should encourage, because it is a state body and state bodies pursue equality and progressivism, not necessarily children’s welfare (which might fairly be described as an optional extra, desirable but not necessarily the objective).

It’s easy and a bit cheap just to call this “creepy” and “disgusting”. It is those things, of course, but not necessarily in the views of the people who run the HSE and have been to three dozen professional seminars on LGBT equality and so on. I guarantee you that right now in HSE towers, there are some very annoyed people upset at the backwardness of the backlash, and society’s failure to comprehend the emotional struggle of a transwoman who doesn’t feel complete because he can’t breastfeed his child. Will nobody think of the new-fangled “woman” who will simply never experience that bond with “her” child which can only come from, eh, chestfeeding?

It’s not fair. That’s how they think, the people who brought you this conference.

And in a sense, stopping the conference – pausing it – is a very hollow victory indeed. Especially if we still continue to espouse our national obsessions with equality and progressivism, which are what brought us the conference in the first place.

The bigger problem is this: When we decreed that the gays (a great bunch of lads mostly, don’t get me wrong) were entirely equal to the rest of us, what did we mean, exactly? Did we mean that they aren’t allowed to breastfeed, when medicines exist that make it possible? If we answer “no” to that question, why do we do it?

There are two reasons we might give: That “it’s not fair to experiment on children like that” and “yuck it’s icky”. The latter one is at least honest.

The first one has the rather unfortunate side-effect of admitting something broader: If experimenting on children is wrong, then why would we permit the entirely experimental process of letting gays and lesbians (and indeed, for completeness, some straight couples) have biological children without having biologically reproductive sex, at all? Why is there a right to have children in the first place?

There’s an inherent unwillingness often, in Ireland, to concede so-called “slippery slope” arguments, which are basically “once you permit X, you will soon be permitting Y”. But the slippery slope is real. Once you say gay relationships are equal to straight ones, you end up here, saying that gay or trans men have the right to breastfeed or chestfeed because they are equal to women.

And if children don’t like it, well. They can spit it out, I suppose. That’s the mindset. And reversing it means reversing a whole lot more than just one conference.

JMG.