Jasmine Sussex is a breastfeeding counselor who spent fifteen years volunteering with the Australian Breastfeeding Association. In 2021 she responded to a post on the Association's Facebook page by saying plainly that the person describing himself as nursing a baby appeared to be a man. She was investigated, and then dismissed, for failing to use gender-neutral language such as "parent" in place of "mother." She has since been pursued through years of legal proceedings for the offense of stating that only women can breastfeed.

Her case is back before the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal. As part of her defense, Sussex's lawyers sought access to the medical records of the man who complained about her, including the treatment used to attempt lactation and the composition of the fluid that was fed to the baby. In January 2026 the tribunal dismissed that request, ruling the man's medical treatment was not relevant to whether Sussex had vilified him. The facts of what was done to that infant were deemed beside the point. Sussex is appealing.

It would be comforting to treat this as an Australian problem. It is not. The same capture of the same kind of organization has already happened in Canada, and it happened more quietly.

A mothers' organization, founded by mothers

La Leche League was founded in 1956 by seven women in Illinois who wanted to help mothers breastfeed at a time when formula was the cultural default and breastfeeding was treated as faintly improper. For nearly seven decades the League existed for one purpose: mother to mother support. Women helped other women feed their babies. Its Canadian arm, La Leche League Canada, carried that mission north of the border for generations of families.

That mission has changed, and the language has changed with it. The change did not arrive all at once. It was introduced gradually, in increments small enough that each one could be waved through as a kindness, until the organization no longer resembled the one those seven women built. In Canada, the change has a clear origin and a clear chronology.

How the change began

In 2012, a Winnipeg parent named Trevor MacDonald approached a local La Leche League chapter for breastfeeding support. MacDonald is a biological woman who identifies as a man, having transitioned with testosterone and chest surgery, then stopped testosterone on medical advice in order to conceive, become pregnant, and give birth. After attending meetings, MacDonald was encouraged to apply for a volunteer leadership role.

La Leche League Canada declined. Its position at the time was unambiguous: a Leader was a mother who had breastfed her baby, and on that basis a man could not become an LLLC Leader. The organisation noted the question had never once arisen in its more than fifty year history.

That clarity did not survive. La Leche League International reviewed the policy, reasoning that it should be a non-discriminatory service organisation, and in 2014 it revised the rules to remove the requirement that a Leader be a woman. In 2016, MacDonald became the first trans-identified person accredited as a La Leche League Leader anywhere in the world. A spokeswoman for the international body explained the reversal by saying the organisation wanted to be on "the right side of history." The prerequisite that a Leader be a woman was simply deleted.

MacDonald did not stop there, and neither did the institutional momentum. In 2012, MacDonald had already founded an international advocacy and support group for trans-identified people who wish to nurse, which now counts thousands of members. In 2014, MacDonald assembled a research team through the University of Ottawa and secured funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The resulting 2016 paper carried the first known use of the word "chestfeeding" in the title of an academic study. Canadian public money, in other words, helped coin and legitimise the very vocabulary now used to write women out of their own biology. MacDonald went on to author the trans nursing tip sheet that La Leche League still circulates, and published a memoir whose title, with no apparent irony, asks the question this whole movement leaves hanging: Where's the Mother?

By 2018, La Leche League Canada and La Leche League USA had issued a joint statement formally adopting "chestfeeding" as organisational language. None of this was an accident, and none of it was the work of a single rogue chapter. It was a deliberate progression, made by the institution itself, from a clear rule that Leaders are mothers to a settled policy that the word mother is negotiable.

What La Leche League Canada now teaches

The language

La Leche League Canada publishes a page titled "What is Chestfeeding?" It defines the term as one used by parents who identify as transmasculine or non-binary, and frames the shift, in its own words, as adding more chairs to the table rather than taking any away. The reassurance is that "mother" and "breastfeeding" will never be erased. Yet the practical effect of the new vocabulary is precisely erasure: the mother becomes a "parent," her breastfeeding becomes "feeding," and the one word that describes what only she can do is quietly retired from official use.

The drug protocol

The more consequential document is La Leche League Canada's trans nursing tip sheet, written for the organization by Trevor MacDonald. Its section on assisting trans women is not about supporting biological mothers. It is a set of instructions for how a biological male can attempt to produce milk and feed an infant from his chest.

The tip sheet states that males may induce lactation by following the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, that a physician would need to prescribe the medications, that birth control pills are started months in advance, and that the drug domperidone is suggested and normally continued for the entire nursing period. La Leche League International's own guidance goes further still, naming the drug spironolactone, taken to suppress testosterone, as part of the same regimen. The document acknowledges that anti-androgens and estrogens are involved and says only that they should be considered for safety on an individual basis.

And then, in the middle of these instructions, the tip sheet concedes the one fact that ought to end the discussion:

there has been little to no research done in this area.

That is La Leche League Canada, in its own document, describing the evidence base behind a practice it nonetheless promotes to its Leaders and the families they serve.

The questions no one is answering

Consider plainly what is being recommended. A biological male takes a combination of hormones and off-label drugs in order to produce a fluid from his chest, which is then fed to a newborn, in some cases in place of the milk of the woman who carried and delivered that child.

Domperidone, the drug at the centre of the protocol, is not approved in Canada to produce milk at all. It is authorised only for certain gastrointestinal conditions and for nausea linked to Parkinson's medication. Using it to stimulate lactation is off-label. Health Canada issued safety advisories in 2012 and again in 2015 warning that domperidone is associated with serious abnormal heart rhythms and sudden cardiac death, particularly at higher doses. In the United States the drug is not approved at all, and the Food and Drug Administration warned against using it to increase milk supply as far back as 2004.

Those warnings concern the adult who swallows the pills, and an adult can read them and consent. The infant cannot. And on the infant there is almost nothing. There is no body of high quality, long term evidence on the composition of milk produced by a male body under this drug regimen. There is nothing reliable on what it does or does not deliver nutritionally to a growing newborn. There is nothing on long term outcomes for the child. This is not our claim to invent or exaggerate. It is the claim La Leche League Canada's own tip sheet makes when it admits that little to no research has been done.

A newborn in the first days of life is the single party to this arrangement who gets no say, signs no waiver, and is handed no safety data. The case that returned to the Queensland tribunal illustrates the stakes exactly. The man at the centre of it had, by his own account, increased his oestrogen and taken domperidone in the months before the birth, and attempted to feed the baby from his chest within the first hour of its life, after signing a hospital waiver, while his wife was being treated for a haemorrhage. He described the experience as making him feel more feminine. The infant's interests do not appear anywhere in that sentence. The child had become a prop in an adult's pursuit of an identity.

When women object, the women are removed

The Canadian pattern mirrors the Australian one with unsettling precision. When women raise concerns, it is reliably the women who are removed.

In November 2024, , then ninety-four years old and one of the seven founders of La Leche League, resigned from the organization she had helped create. She said it had abandoned the natural foundations of mothering in order to accommodate the desires of adults, and that this was destroying the League. In the same period, a director of La Leche League Great Britain, Miriam Main, resigned after her concerns about the steady replacement of "mother" with "parent" and "breastfeeding" with "chestfeeding" were, by her account, simply ignored. The international body had by then directed its British affiliates to support all nursing parents regardless of sex or gender identity.

Marian Leonard Tompson is one of the seven founders of La Leche League International. She was President of La Leche League for 24 years, from 1956 to 1980, and a member of the Founders Advisory Council until her resignation in November 2024, following policy changes regarding the inclusion of transgender women.

So the tally now reads as follows. In Australia, a fifteen-year volunteer was dismissed and dragged before a tribunal. In Britain, a director resigned in protest. In Canada and internationally, the ninety-four-year-old founder herself walked out of the organisation that exists because of her. The direction of travel is identical across all three countries, and so is the figure who is shown the door: the woman who says that mothers are women.

Why this matters in Alberta and across Canada

Our position is neither complicated nor cruel. Adults are free to live and present however they wish, and to call themselves whatever they choose. That freedom does not require a mothers' organisation to dissolve the word mother. It does not require Canadian public funding to bankroll the vocabulary that erases women. And it certainly does not require a newborn to serve as the test subject for an adult's sense of self, fed a fluid of unknown content under a drug regimen no one has properly studied.

This is the same logic we have watched dismantle other single-sex provisions for women and girls. Once the category of woman is redefined as a feeling rather than a fact, every space and service built around female biology becomes negotiable: the shelter, the prison, the changing room, and now the breastfeeding support group. Many of the women who turn to organizations like La Leche League are vulnerable, exhausted, recovering from birth, and in some cases healing from male violence. They were promised mother to mother support. They are entitled to know that the support remains exactly that.

A breastfeeding group for mothers should be free to say plainly that it is for mothers. Women who have been told, correctly, that human milk matters should not then be told that the sex of the body producing it is irrelevant and unmentionable. A child's safety should never be ranked below an adult's feelings.

Only women can breastfeed. Saying so should not cost a woman her volunteer role, her reputation, or years of her life in a tribunal. That it now does, in Australia, in Britain and in Canada alike, is the clearest possible measure of how far these institutions have drifted from the women and children they were built to serve.

What you can do

1. Share this story. Most Canadians have no idea that their national breastfeeding organisation now coaches biological males to lactate, or that it admits in its own materials that the practice is unstudied. Awareness is the first and most powerful step.

2. Ask questions of your own providers. If you are an expectant or nursing mother, you are entitled to single-sex support and to plain, accurate language about your own body. Ask for it.

3. Stand with the women who speak. Jasmine Sussex, Marian Tompson, Miriam Main and others have paid a real and personal price for stating obvious facts. They should not have to stand alone.

4. Contact your elected representatives. Ask where they stand on protecting the sex-based interests of women and children in healthcare and in the institutions that serve mothers, and ask why public research funding has gone toward erasing the word mother.

5. Support our work. For Women and Girls Alberta is volunteer-led and independently funded. Help us keep raising these issues where they are happening, here at home.