Founder of La Leche League resigns over 'breastfeeding men'.

Marian Tompson says the organisation has become a 'travesty of her original intent'.

I know a little bit about being a ‘founder’ of something. In 2012, I established a network of meet ups for pregnant women, linked up by social media: The Positive Birth Movement (PBM) - an idea that snowballed rapidly into over 450 free to attend groups all over the world. I was partly inspired by my own experiences at another similar network, the breastfeeding support groups of La Leche League (LLL). Like The PBM, LLL brought women together in the same room to champion and support each other. Like the PBM, LLL was grassroots, with nobody involved making a profit or selling extra products or services. Like the PBM, LLL was a thing of beauty, an absolute oasis for women in need in a world which often tosses pregnant women and new mothers casually aside. And like the PBM, LLL is being destroyed by the falsehood that people can change their sex.

Today a letter from one of the founders of LLL, Marian Tompson, was circulated to members of the organisation, some of whom have passed it to me. Seven women founded La Leche League in 1954, and Marian Tompson was one of them.

Six of the seven LLL founders at the time of creation

As far as I know, only two of them are still alive, and Marian is the only one of those two who have remained actively involved in LLL. Now she has resigned, stating that the organisation has become ‘a travesty of her original intent’, by ‘subtly shifting to include men who…want to have the experience of breastfeeding’.

Here’s her letter in full:

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Dear Leaders of La Leche League,

I want to share some important news.

On November 6, 2024, I resigned from the LLLI Board of Directors and from LLL itself, an organization that has become a travesty of my original intent.

From an organization with the specific Mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them, LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.

This shift from following the norms of Nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organization.

Despite my efforts these past two years as a Board member, it has become clear that there is nothing I can do to change this trajectory by staying involved.

Still, I leave the door open to come back when La Leche League returns to its original Mission and Purpose.

I thank each of you for your years of making this world a healthier and happier place by being there for all mothers needing help with breastfeeding their babies.

With much love,

Marian Tompson

Founder of La Leche League

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Like so many women’s organisations, LLL has been destroyed by gender ideology, as demands are made for language to be changed, and workers at grass roots level - and even entire boards of directors - fall out over the fundamentals of their purpose. At PBM, I had made what was probably the mistake of being the only person in charge, and this meant that it became personal: Milli Hill had to conform to the new world order or Milli Hill would get attacked and called ‘bigot’, ‘facist’, ‘evil’ etc. I had to step away from that situation to protect myself personally, and PBM was therefore no more. At LLL and other organisations, it’s more complicated: the infighting has to be done via committees, procedures, boards and policies - but essentially it’s the same outcome in the end - organisations set up for women, by women, get destroyed. In the case of LLL, the problem has become even more complex, by the insistence not just that women who don’t identify as women are made to feel included, but that actual bepenised men are also not left out - because, according to some who have completely lost their grip on reality, such men can induce lactation and feed that liquid to newborn babies - and they are entitled to LLL’s support. ‘Inclusivity’ and ‘equality’ have come to mean that women cannot have anything for themselves.

It was partly a linguistic trick that set this whole toppling of LLL in motion. I wrote in this issue of The Word is Woman about the efforts in 2012 of trans identifying woman Trevor McDonald to effectively get LLL to ‘admit men’ - albeit in her case, female ones. McDonald, who sees herself as a ‘dad’ and could not breastfeed due to her elective mastectomy, nevertheless felt she wished to be a ‘LLL Leader’, and that the organisation would therefore have to rewrite the rules which had previously said that only women could take this role. The criteria was changed to suit this one person, and this eroded a boundary: LLL was no longer ‘for women only’ - Trevor had single-handedly eroded the organisations entire purpose, ostensibly to serve female ‘trans men’, but guess who would eventually benefit? Now we find ourselves in a place where board members at LLLGB have felt bullied over the insistence to admit ‘trans women’ (males), and Marian Tompson - without whom the entire organisation would presumably not have begun - has resigned over a bizarre and persistent need to centre the sexual fantasies of adult men over the wellbeing of women and babies.

As the resignation of Marian Tompson is discussed, Trevor McDonald is still using this same technique of conflating the actual genuine struggles of women with the whining disappointment of entitled males who can’t get what they want. On a facebook post about Tompson’s resignation, Trevor insists that trans women (men) are not only genuinely women in every sense, but that they can lactate and breastfeed. When it’s pointed out that, although with a cocktail of drugs a male can produce a tiny amount of ‘milk’ from the nipples, this is untested and is definitely not enough to feed a baby, Trevor states that this is ‘shaming people with a low supply’, as if saying that a man cannot breastfeed a baby is in some way a judgement of a woman who is struggling to make milk. It amazes me that a woman can use other women’s difficulties in this way in order to support men’s rights - it’s one of the worst cases of internalised misogyny I think I’ve ever seen.

I hope that Marian Tompson’s words of resignation are heard far and wide. I remember when she posted an article about women and mothers being erased in 2021 and got piled on for it by trans activists. I actually screenshot this comment at the time because it stood out for me as such a great example of the utter disrespect shown to older women (I call this misogygris).

We need to listen to women like Marian who have decades of experience on this earth and who are warning us we have lost our way. “This shift from following the norms of Nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organization”, she writes. To some this may seem to only be about breastfeeding or LLL, but there is more at stake. Pay attention, and speak up too, because we are witnessing a major backlash against women’s rights here. When a man’s need to be at a breastfeeding meeting is seen as more important than the survival of a 70 year old women’s organisation, this really should be enough to make us wake up and speak up. What more will we allow to be lost before we do?

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