Breast man

Jacob Engelsman is based in the US and specialises in helping non-gestational parents, meaning parents who have not given birth, to induce lactation. The Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland (ALCI) booked Engelsman to speak at its annual conference in Galway next month, and all hell broke loose.

Engelsman was reported to have given previous presentations including one entitled ‘Inducing Lactation for Kinksters’. In his book, Lactation for the Rest of Us, he writes that, aside from ‘cis men’ wanting to lactate for the same reasons as anyone else, namely to feed and bond with their baby, they may wish to do so ‘to a lesser extent for curiosity, fun or sexual gratification’. After press coverage, ALCI paused ticket sales and removed the programme from its website. It has since announced that the conference will move online and that Engelsman will no longer speak.

Engelsman is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC), but for his critics, his willingness to discuss lactation for sexual gratification violates one of humanity’s most sacred taboos: the bond between a mother and her baby.

Last night, Jana Lunden of the Natural Women’s Council chaired an X Space with other concerned Irish women. Speakers at Beyond Boundaries: When Does Inclusion Go Too Far? included Laoise de Brún of The Countess, Sarah Holmes of Genspect and Dr Niamh Regan of the Parents’ Rights Alliance.

‘When does diversity cross the line into a child-safeguarding issue?’ Lunden began. She then advised listeners against focusing too closely on this one ALCI ‘disaster’. Yes, breastfeeding has been reduced to a fetish, but the problem is not really about one speaker or one conference. It is not happening in isolation. Radical gender ideology deliberately transgresses boundaries. In Ireland it has infiltrated schools, universities, the civil service, the Health Service Executive (HSE), charities and businesses. They have all been captured.

Laoise de Brún, founder of The Countess, spoke of her wish to help mothers breastfeed after receiving brilliant support in the UK when she had her own babies. The experience inspired her to become an IBCLC. She said:

‘It’s so enraging and so reflective of Irish policymaking that, here in Ireland, where we have the lowest Baby Friendly Initiative compliance in all of Europe, at just 40 per cent, there is no budget and a chronic shortage of IBCLCs. No politician is willing to help women breastfeed, but suddenly there’s loads of money to fly this man out here.’

K, another concerned Irish mother, who is known on social media as @Kø2568, researches and reports on the ideological capture of the Irish education system. She hoped the issue might break through to those she called ‘the normies’.

‘LGBTQ+ inclusivity is not about being nice to people,’ she said. ‘We need to hold the line, and we’re seeing in real time what not holding the line means.’

Genspect’s Sarah Holmes added that the real story was how we got here, pointing out that this was not an isolated incident.  She pointed out that, in 2019, ALCI had publicised an account of a gay male couple attempting to induce lactation to feed an adopted baby. The organisation, which says it has more than 400 members from different disciplines and backgrounds, had programmed talks on lactation support for gender-diverse families and the creation of ‘gender-affirming clinical spaces’.

Dr Niamh Regan of the Parents’ Rights Alliance did not pull any punches. ‘In all of this stuff,’ she said, ‘the children are the targets. Essentially, we’ve had taxpayer funding for the abuse of newborns.’

‘The silence has to break,’ Regan said. ‘The only people now standing in the way of the abuse are mothers and and parents.

‘There’s nobody left except the likes of us on our laptops. We have to hold the line for our own children, but also for childhood itself. Don’t look left, don’t look right, look up. It’s coming from the top and it’s very well funded.’

Neither ALCI nor the HSE has apologised. The HSE defended the planned talks on the grounds that increasing numbers of babies were being born into ‘diverse family structures’, while ALCI said the reasoning behind the programme had been ‘taken completely out of context’.

Yet the issue is not exactly what Engelsman might have planned to discuss, but whether proper due diligence was carried out before he was invited. Mothers and babies must be protected from perversion, and babies’ nutritional needs must always take precedence over adult desires.

The strategy of queering everything grinds on, while safeguarding is sacrificed on the altar of inclusion. Men can become so ‘womanly’ that they are encouraged to appropriate the tender, beautiful and natural bond between mother and baby.

Nor is the Galway conference an isolated example. University College Cork is due to host TransCare 2026 on 11 and 12 September. The conference on trans, gender-diverse and intersex-inclusive healthcare includes a workshop entitled ‘Horizontal Lactation Care: Taking the Power Back to Protect, Promote and Support Human Milk’.

Jana Lunden of the Natural Women’s Council spoke for all of us when she said: ‘We can never, ever let this be normalised. They’ve been boiling the frog for years, but now the frog’s just exploded.’

Whether from our laptops or by whatever other means are available to us, we have to stop it. This latest atrocity may galvanise an army to see the battle for what it is, to say no, to speak up and to change the world for the better.

For more information, or to support any of the sex realist organisations mentioned in this piece, please visit:

Genspect https://genspect.org/

Natural Women’s Council https://www.naturalwomenscouncil.ie/

Parents’ Rights Alliance
https://parentsrightsalliance.com/

The Countess https://thecountess.ie/