The American Academy of Pediatrics, famous for allowing fashionable ideologies to warp its policy statements, has a new one out on “breastfeeding and the use of human milk.” Under the section “infants born to gender-diverse families.” the statement reads:
Children of gender-diverse parents may have less access to human milk because of both social and biological constraints. Breastfeeding is used throughout this document; however the word “breastfeeding” itself may be both triggering, and less accurate, for gender-diverse parents, who may prefer the term “chestfeeding,” which is more inclusive of lactation in the context of varying physiologic anatomies.
Just a reminder that in 2010, the AAP’s policy statement on female genital mutilation, written by a religious-studies professor, and euphemistically titled “ritual genital cutting of female minors,” stated that “above all” what was important in handling this issue was “sensitivity to the cultural background of the patient and her parents and appreciation of the significance of this custom in their tradition.”
The AAP’s 2016 and 2018 policy statements on so-called “gender-affirming care” were even worse. As I wrote at the time:
It’s instructive to take a look at the AAP’s track record. Its previous guidelines, which were released in 2016 but were very similar to the 2018 policy statement in terms of content, had as their lead author a trans activist, Gabe Murchison. At the time, Murchison had a bachelor’s degree in “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” and a master’s in public health, “social and behavioral sciences” from Yale University.
Murchison’s lack of medical expertise may help explain why the 2016 AAP guidelines stated in bold, under “What we know for sure,” that “there is evidence that both reparative therapy and delayed transition can have serious negative consequences for children.” This claim has been denied by experts — including Susan Bradley, who is a child psychiatrist with 40 years of clinical experience and research with gender-dysphoric youth, and who founded the Toronto Gender Identity Clinic at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.