As America’s baby formula shortage continues to inspire scammers and politicians alike, parents have become desperate for solutions. Sometimes they get so creative that it worries the medical establishment; take how doctors have had to warn parents away from dangerous approaches like making their own baby formula. Yet in the midst of all this, a purported transgender woman who opened up on Reddit about being able to breastfeed her daughter — and despite having biologically male breasts — received an all-too-predictable anti-science, transphobic backlash.
Ironically, though, individuals with biologically male breasts actually do have the ability to lactate. But if you’re a cisgendered man aspiring to make your own breastmilk amid a shortage, I have some bad news: making this happen is very, very complicated.
“Everyone has the same basic breast structures at birth,” Tamar Reisman, MD, assistant professor of medicine, endocrinology, diabetes, and bone disease at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told Salon by email. (Reisman has assisted in helping a transgender woman exclusively breastfeed.) “Exposure to 4 ingredients are needed to transform the breast and allow for milk production and expression — estradiol, progesterone, prolactin, and oxytocin.”
