BRENDAN O’NEILL: That breastfeeding bloke is the last straw.
Surely the breastfeeding bloke will be the last straw? All last week, institutions of repute – ITV, the TUC, sections of the Labour Party – insisted that Mika Minio-Paluello is a mum. In truth, he’s a man. This former Labour special adviser and TUC staffer is a bloke who only says he’s a woman. Science, reason and every chromosome in his own body beg to differ. And yet ITV had him on the news saying the cost-of-living crisis is ‘tough if you’re a mum like me’. When actual women pushed back against this lunatic description of a man as a mother, they were scolded by the TUC and the rest. ‘Mika’s a mum!’, cried the elites in a frenzy of unreason.
A couple of days into this outbreak of establishment derangement, Mika himself posted a Twitter thread that included a photo of him breastfeeding a baby. He wasn’t really breastfeeding, of course. Because he’s a man. He does not lactate like a woman. He cannot produce the milk an infant needs. To some of us it looked like he was posing with a babe at his parched, useless fella’s nipple to try to validate his identity as a ‘transwoman’. What say you now, TUC? Stella Creasy? All you bourgeois radicals on the internet who raged like modern-day witchfinders against Rosie Duffield when she dared to say Mika isn’t a mother? Do you still say he’s a mum? Do you think he’s breastfeeding that child? Do you think it’s okay to try to make a newborn suckle on the moob of a biological male?
Here’s why this story – mad as it is – matters. Because it represents yet another provocation by the elites. Yet another front in their culture war on truth and reason. Yet another of their assaults on us and what we know to be true. These ideologues are goading us. They say we should call women who give birth ‘birthing parents’, but this bloke? He’s a mother and woe betide the crone who disagrees. Actual breastfeeding should be called ‘chestfeeding’, they suggest, but this man putting a desiccated teat in a newborn’s mouth? That’s breastfeeding. Seriously – for how much longer are we going to tolerate this gaslighting?
Related: Let Allie Beth Stuckey explain the proper response to being called a “transphobe.”
We should have a strong aversion toward men trying to “breastfeed” babies. We should be averse to the idea that “female” is a costume to be donned or an identity to declare. These fears and aversions are healthy and logical.
What they aren’t is irrational. This is why “transphobe” isn’t accurate, because “phobia” is an *irrational* fear or aversion. But the fear and aversion felt in this case are extremely rational.
Read the whole thing.