Breastfeeding expert Jasmine Sussex will appear before the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal on Monday for a compulsory conference, to defend a charge of vilification for expressing a belief that men can’t breastfeed. Sussex responded to a newspaper report about Queenslander Jennifer Buckley, who identifies as a trans mother, taking hormones to grow breasts and induce lactation to breastfeed a newborn baby. She will be represented by lawyers from the Human Rights Law Alliance (HRLA).
In 2019 Sussex made a series of social media posts that included “labelling attempts by transwomen to breastfeed their children ‘experimental’ and calling it a ‘dangerous fetish,'” The Herald Sun reported.
The e-safety commissioner required Sussex to remove some posts.
“Breastfeeding belongs exclusively to mothers and our babies,” she told the paper. “We are the only humans who can make breast milk to nourish our babies.”
HRLA describes Sussex as “a passionate and publicly vocal defender of women’s rights and breastfeeding mums…” who “has run afoul of Queensland’s antidiscrimination laws by publicly contending that “men cannot breastfeed ‘.”
Buckley is the biological father of the child, who was transitioning at the time of the birth, and took hormones to stimulate lactation. “For the past 6 weeks I have been taking a drug called domperidone to increase prolactin in an attempt to be able to produce breast milk so that I can have the experience of breastfeeding,” Buckley wrote in a Facebook post, according to the Herald Sun.
One issue likely to feature in Sussex’s case is to what extent the breastfeeding was “successful” that is whether enough milk was produced to sustain a child or not. A NIH study records four cases of lactation by transgender women, recording 30ml of milk for a featured case. This small amount of milk will raise the issue of whose needs are being met – is this breastfeeding to benefit the child or the parent’s identity?
Image: Jasmine Sussex. Image Credit: HRLA