Ruth: Hello, I'm Ruth, one of the La Lecce League GB former trustees and former leaders who's been caught up in the insanity over the past year. La Lecce League is a breastfeeding support organization. It was started 70 years ago, when you couldn't say the word breast, ironically, by a group of seven breastfeeding mothers who wanted to support other mothers to breastfeed locally.

It is based on mother to mother support for breastfeeding and mothering through breastfeeding. That means that LLL has grown into an international organization. 

We're here as a group of former leaders, which is what LLL League Breastfeeding Counsellors are called. Some of us have also been trustees of LLLGB and we're going to have a conversation with Julie Bindle about what has been happening in LLL as a result of gender ideology.

Julie: Hello, I'm Julie Bindle and delighted to be talking with you all. The story is obviously a long line in a terrible and increasing number of crazy stories. I'm a journalist and a feminist campaigner. 

Rej: Hi, I'm Rej. I'm a former League of Britain councillor and trustee. And I'm just here to chat a bit about our experience and what went on while we were trustees.

Loreto: Hello, and as well, my name is Loreto and I am Leche League breastfeeding supporter. Yeah, thank you very much for inviting us for in this platform.  

Katrina: I'm Catriona. I'm a newly resigned La Leche League leader. I am, was, a leader for about 22 years, something like that, maybe even a bit longer than that. And I've just resigned. I wasn't a trustee. So I'm here to chat about my experiences as an LLL leader, watching sort of from, from the side-lines. 

Ruth: I start. Before I became a trustee, I was the editor of Breastfeeding Matters, which was the member magazine for LLGB, which I loved. It was an amazing job, getting all the stories from mothers, so many of them about huge barriers and hurdles that they've overcome to breastfeed their babies.

But what I noticed as time went on was it wasn't the mothers, but leaders were starting to use different language and they were no longer talking about mothers and women. They were starting to talk about breastfeeding families and mothers and parents and eventually it got to the point where I could not, I just couldn't do it anymore because it was changing the meaning and it was detracting from the mission of LLL, which has always been about supporting the mother baby dyad. So I stepped down from that.

 I had a conversation with the then publications director about why and my concerns about the language and also about their support of male lactation because it's, it's wrong on so many levels. It's a safeguarding issue. It's a disruption to the mother baby dyad, which is what any breastfeeding supporter knows is key to breastfeeding support.

And the conversation went along the lines of, well, there's research about, about inducing lactation, so it's all fine. And when I pointed out that the male and female physiology is different, so you can't just say, there's research, that'll do. It seemed to come as a bit of a surprise, but it didn't seem to change the mind of the leader I was talking to.

So, yeah, I stepped down at that point and decided to stand for election to the Council of Directors, which is what we call the trustees, along with some of these other fabulous women. So Loreto, do you want to say how you came to it? 

Loreto: Yeah. In my case, I noticed probably about two, three years ago the change of words, the usually leaders, the breastfeeding counsellors we have a page where we are supporting each other and from being a really nurturing, supporting environment, it became some, some people there to monitor and to censor what you were saying or not.

And probably for me, when they really hit me full blast. It was a conversation. They were talking about a book. I was not really into all of this, but I had a friend that lent me the Irreversible Damage. So the book they were talking about, it was about some, probably about somebody transitioning and how an amazing story and how inspiring and stuff like that.

And then just really naive, I just said, well, I'm reading now Reversible Damage, you may find this book interesting. And suddenly, within a couple of hours, there were about 150 messages, and I suddenly became all sorts of things from a TERF, which I have no idea, I have to look in the dictionary what that word was, bigot, inciting, violence, racist.

All sorts of things came and I was thinking, oh my dear, what is going on here? And this is when probably that was my kind of wake up call to think something here is changing and I don't understand what is going on here. And then, well, yeah, as I got more involved, I have probably the happy idea to join the inclusion committee at the international level.

And that was another eye opening, because the dynamics was not very much of what I would consider inclusion. It was as well a lot of monitoring, censorship, punishing, and stuff like that. And then I joined in April this year, the Council of Directors. 

Julie: Do you, or any of you think that there were some key individual trans activists behind this, or were they already within the organisation?

In other words, were they attacked from outside, or persuaded from outside, or did they go along with the institutional capture that so many other organizations have? 

Loreto: My feeling and my experience, and I don't know what my colleagues would say, is that some of them, or well for me, all of them were leaders and they were, some of them very, very long term counsellors.

Some of them were like over 20 years. And probably, some of them have children that they transition or they have like a personal circumstance. And what I noticed is that this work seems to have been done in the background, some changes in the policies, and they managed to get in the key roles where they could control many other positions and they gained the control, first of all, very quietly, and then when it became more apparent of what was going on, then we realized, unfortunately, we were far too late.

Rej: I was just going to echo that, but I think there was an element of some who really were quite hard-line TRA types who, like Loretta said, had put themselves into really strategic positions on the board and in all the inclusion type committees. I Think over here in the GB Council of Directors. It was a bit more, like, women who just wanted to be kind and genuinely think that it's progressive and you know, these poor people who are trapped in the wrong body. But they're so far down this hole that they can't really dig themselves back out. and they were not open to listening to another point of view. 

One of the reasons I joined the council was because there'd been this slow insidious creep of language and shutting down of any type of discussion that was deemed harmful, one of those buzzwords.

So yeah, I think you've got a real mix of issues going on that created this perfect storm almost.

Julie: Just, I think that with these organizations and obviously we haven't heard everybody's stories yet, but I'm becoming increasingly aware of trans activists, whether they're trans identified or not, placing themselves strategically in organizations, as you've just said.

 And conspiracy theories aren't helpful. And usually there's no conspiracy. It's a snowball effect, isn't it? But it's what happened to, for example, Vancouver Rape Relief back in the 1990s, before we had any organized trans activists in the UK. on that level. And they did place, strategically place trans activists in organizations where they could take legal challenges or disrupt or cause problems.

And so I think that this is what now is increasingly happening because as they lose legal cases, as they lose some of the sympathy and misguided understanding of the general sort of liberal middle class public, this is the tactic. I mean, would you say this is something that you've seen? 

Ruth: Yes, I think so.

LLL International is obviously, as the name suggests, an international organization. It's based in the USA, but there are, I don't know if branch is quite the right word because it's a complicated structure, but there are different parts of it in different countries where the situation is very, very different.

What LLLL GBS relationship to the international organization is as an affiliate, but we, I say we, we are not part of it anymore because we've either been kicked out or resigned. It's an affiliate that is an independent charity in the UK. What the agreement is that the, the different parts of LLL have to follow the policy as far as they can within their local laws.

The start of all of the ‘being kind’ and the insidious nature of how it happened was because there was a mother called Trevor in Canada who wanted to become a leader. And language was changed to accommodate Trevor. And that was kind of changing policy by the back door, because once you change the language and it's no longer about mothers, because one person doesn't identify as a mother, even though they have been prejnant with and given birth to a baby, that's kind of how it started.

And Trevor did not stick around particularly long, but was a leader for a while and left devastation in the wake of all that. 

Julie: Were you in voluntary roles, paid or unpaid? 

Ruth: There are very, very few paid roles in our LLL league. There's an admin person, but all LLL volunteers are that, volunteers. There is no payment at all.

Julie: So it's exactly what's happening elsewhere, isn't it, where we're committed to a particular issue or cause or political strategy, and they stop us from doing that work. And this is, I mean, this is a familiar story, but it's not a story that's been told as much as the one where women and some men, but mainly women have been driven out of jobs and college courses and their livelihood affected.

But it's something that I'm really interested in about how we are prevented from doing what we love, what we passionately care about. Because if people ask me about what I lost through the years that I've been targeted and then they say, well, look at her, she's writing in national newspapers and she lives in a nice house in North London.

It wasn't income that I lost. It was all the opportunities that I wanted to explore to do unpaid work with students and with feminist campaigning. And that's what they go after, obviously. And so it was all of that that really hurt. 

Now, obviously livelihood is one thing. If you can't feed your children or keep a roof over your head, that's life changing, but so is the kind of thing that we're prevented from doing.

And it has a personal effect that is different and in some ways runs deeper than an effect of losing a job that you were never keen on. I'm thinking, I'm not hierarching anything. I'm just aware that this is a story that hasn't been told. So I'd love to hear from, from any of you that wish to talk about it. 

What it felt like being kicked out of an unpaid role because you were committed to that issue. 

Rej: So for me, it was really difficult. I had a group that I'd been running for quite some time. I was in a slightly different position in that I had co leaders. So The group still ran, but other trustees, they were the only leader in their area.

So once their group went, when they were suspended, and then when they were disaccredited, their group had to close down. So the mums, and I think this, this is one of the key things. We all do it because we really, really want to help mothers. You get personal satisfaction from it, but the key thing is helping those mums, and that went.

 But we also, you know, saying about that, I don't think you can actually separate out in a way the paid and the unpaid because some of us also have had issues speaking out because if we speak out as a leader or as a trustee, there's always the risk that we'll get back to employers or potentially impact on employment in the future.

But yeah, it's been incredibly hard. 

Julie: That's a good point about one affecting the other for sure. And then of course the other issue is that if you resign from your paid work, or you're pushed out of it, you tend to get pushed out of polite society as well. So the liberals, the well-meaning liberals that don't get any more sympathy or support from me, back away and don't want to be associated. And say things like, well, I don't want to be seen to be transphobic because you are, I know you're not, but you are seen to be transphobic. And that's, that's basically it. That's all it needs. 

Katrina: I think if I can just join in for a moment, the issue, it being a volunteer role is, the LLL league has been, A funny old organization over the years.

It's been quietly radical sticking up for mothers and babies unwavering and unchanged for nigh on 70 years now. And in spite of all the fashions that come and go, it always stood up for the fact that the needs of babies have never changed, and the needs of mothers have never really changed. They are vulnerable, they are suggestible, they are sometimes really struggling.

We're in a unique position, and for most LL League leaders I think that I've met, it's formed part of our own identity and to have to make the decision to walk away. I've been involved with my local group for my son who has just turned 27. And he was about nine months when I went for the first time and I've resigned. All my co leaders have gone, that's five of us.

 Now paid employment isn't so much the issue for me because I'm self-employed anyway, but it's the responsibility of what about the other breastfeeding counsellors who don't have another way of helping because they've resigned from their accreditation and yet they still have a passionate need to be there for mothers. The group structure has worked so well for so many years.  My concern has been a safeguarding concern and also the fact that when that door closes and there are women in the room, it's a safe space and magic happens. They open up, they relax. We can help them. 

They're sometimes partially unclothed because they're trying to breastfeed.  Trying to gate-keep and keep that a safe space for women has become impossible and I'm really sad about it and it's nothing to do with any individual who might need help. A trans woman may also need help and support to feed their baby but this was a specific single cause organization and to be told over the past year ‘Oh, well, LL League has never been a single sex organisation.’

Well, I'm sorry, everybody who accredited as a leader would have been taught that it's a mother to mother breastfeeding organisation. So the identity aspect of it and the sadness of leaving runs really deep for me and for lots of people. It's more than just walking away from a volunteer role because there was nothing like it.

Julie: And we all know anyone that's worked in the anti-male violence. against women and girls world knows about the vulnerability of prejnancy and how many women first experience serious domestic violence during their prejnancy and then after the birth of the baby. Their vulnerability is compounded, isn't it?

We have to be absolutely honest and open about this, which many of you have been, that this is a massive safeguarding issue. And yet this is somehow going under the radar of the organizations like the, which is the Midwives Association, the Royal College of Midwives, that have de facto supported the idea of surrogacy in the UK and have got on board with some of these unsafe, abusive practices. 

So have you had any support from other organisations related to the whole prejnancy, childbirth, mothering? 

 Ruth: It's absolutely insane how captured the breastfeeding and maternity world is. There are some fabulous groups such as With Women who have been very supportive.

There's also CAN-SG (Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender) who are a little bit less specific but in and also professional in the medical world and we've got one foot in that world and one foot, not because breastfeeding, it's biological, but it's also so much more than that. It's mothering, which is what LLL has always been about is mothering through breastfeeding.

And now we're told that we can't use the word and not, we can't use it, but we have to use it along with other words, which have a completely different meaning. So, yeah, but I just wanted to go back to the safeguarding issue. It is absolutely, what has always been front and centre for me, with a specific mother in mind who I supported, and who I've talked to about this, who couldn't have come to a meeting if there had been men there, and no matter how those men in question identify, once you let a male in, then you can't keep other males out.

So you could have a meeting where there is a lovely supportive father who wants to do nothing but support his wife. But just letting one man in means that other mothers won't be able to come. They just wouldn't feel safe. And that's something that we tried to talk about in our trustee meetings, was what the impact would be on being ‘inclusive’ very much in inverted commas, and we talked about this, how if you open up to be welcoming to everyone and say these meetings are for everyone, then there would be far more women self- excluding than men want to come. Whether those men are lovely, safe, nice, supportive ones, or otherwise. 

It's about who can be in the room if men are there as well. And you've got mothers who've been subject to domestic abuse or sexual violence, you've got women who are of a religious background who couldn't be in the room if there are men there, and there are just vulnerable mums who don't want to breastfeed in front of someone else's partner, because when you're learning to breastfeed in the early days, it is a natural thing to do, but it's also a learned thing to do.

We learn by watching other women, mothers, and it's just not possible to do that if you're not comfortable. And women are comfortable doing these things around other women on the whole. They're not comfortable doing it in front of other men, no matter how lovely or otherwise they might be. And once you open that door, it's not going to be the lovely ones who come. It's going to be the ones who want to be there to cross boundaries, to watch other women, make women feel uncomfortable. And even if only one of them comes, or even if just there's the possibility of them coming, it excludes women. It excludes mothers who need to be there. 

Julie: As terrible as this is, and as extreme as this will sound to those who are listening that don't know or that choose not to know, some of these men will have a sexual interest in babies. 

And I can't, I just can't believe, I can't understand why this was not seen as just wrong, wrong, wrong, dangerous from the beginning without any ideology even being considered, discussed, pandered to. Just some things are dangerous and wrong and sort of like having a bottle of whiskey and getting in your car and driving through Waterloo Bridge.

 Why do you think that these men have been pandered to by those that do know better? Where does the fear come from? 

Rej: I think it's the ‘be kind’ thing again, on the whole. I think it's trying to be kind. I think a lot of women also, even if they don't realise it, pander to men. It's just in-built, they've been socialised to look after men, to care for men, to assume good intent.

Oh, you know, ‘but they're not one of them’. ‘Oh, they wouldn't do that’ How do you know? ‘But they're not a man’ and that's how the language changes. They muddy the waters, so meaning is not clear. And that includes things like not being allowed to talk about sex based reality. Someone got very much told off for saying that within an LLL group.

And the problem is, when you can't say that somebody is a male individual or a male bodied individual or born male, but identifies as female, you have to say things like, ‘living as a woman’. You then, when you start to talk about male lactation and supporting male lactation, they go, ‘but we're not supporting male lactation. We're not supporting men to breastfeed’ You don't think you are? ‘No, we're not. We're supporting trans women. They're women. They're living as women’ and it makes it incredibly difficult to have these conversations because yeah, it just gets twisted and you get told, ‘well, no, we're not talking about that though’ Well, that's what I'm talking about. ‘Well, you can't talk about that because that's going to cause harm. That's going to hurt male feelings’ and the conversations get totally muddied. 

Ruth: Yeah, I was going to say the problem that we had as trustees was that we needed to talk about policies. We needed to talk about safeguarding policy, and we needed to talk about the inclusion policy and what happened when we try to do that was the inclusion policy that we needed to talk about because it was a safeguarding issue was used to stop us talking about it in exactly the way that Rej just described so you can't talk about this because about this policy as trustees, because this policy says you have to use the words to mean things they don't. And it was just, it was Orwellian, it was just insane, trying to deal with that as trustees where you have a legal responsibility to do your job as a trustee, but you can't. Yeah, it was utterly mind bogglingly ridiculous. 

Katrina: I'm just remembering how over the years, any time that we had phone calls on the helpline from men, we were always told to try and speak to the mother, if she's there, or to try and help communicate via the father or the male caller if the mother's English wasn't good enough, but if at any time we had a man ringing a few leaders or asking very detailed questions about physical anatomy, maybe, maybe discussing, could you talk to me about nipples? You know, there's all sorts of scenarios that have come up over the years. That was immediately flagged up as something we should contact safeguarding about, but at the same time as that in the background, there's now been a shift to Oh, but if you don't like LLL and the new policies, you should go away and start your own organization.

There's this implication that we, by asking these questions have changed, and that should be starting something and we should be starting something else when actually it's the background policies and language that have changed from underneath us. 

My most memorable thing I read for a long time was the one that said, you know, ‘if the word mother becomes a roadblock, we need to change that’

Now, as a mother to mother organization, I couldn't believe that that phrase was trotted out. ‘If the word mother becomes a roadblock’ women aren't equal anyway. I mean, any woman around the world is more vulnerable than any man. What's that saying in The Colour Purple? Where she said, he says to the lead the protagonist. ‘You're black, you're poor, you're ugly and you're a woman’ That means you're nothing at all. That is the lowest you can go. 

We have this little special space and I'm still going to create it locally, but we had that. I don't really think it's fair to women to have to widen that out to male people. And also it takes me out of my area of expertise.

 I was an LL leader because I was a mother and I could share experiences and knowledge and information with other mothers. I wasn't trained to help male lactation. I wasn't trained to help inform anyone male, how to breastfeed. Or even it goes beyond the normal course of breastfeeding when we talk about women who've had double mastectomy, but it's called trans-masculinization surgery.

How do I reconcile that with maybe I might have a mum in the group who's had to have a unilateral or even bilateral mastectomy, but she might then sit by someone who's had just masculinization surgery? How do I, I don't have the expertise to sort of balance the needs out. My priority would be to listen to the woman.

Obviously women who've had the chest masculinization surgery might come to meetings presenting as men, but because they were born women, we would still welcome them. But when people have had chemically, well hormonally induced breasts, that's a whole different game that I don't think we're set up to fully understand. As far as I see, the evidence and the experience isn't there. We've looked at the research. There isn't much there.

Julie: So could somebody, tell the listeners exactly what male lactation is, means, how it's induced. Just lay it out very boldly for the listeners. Some would have actually been convinced that perhaps this is possible.

Ruth: Yeah, it's possible to induce lactation of a sort to a degree, which is using hormones and medications, some of which would be used to induce lactation in women. But lactation is part of the female human reproductive system. It's not part of the male reproductive system, because we know they've got one part that they can do quite well, and the rest is down to us, basically.

It's unknown how safe it is for the baby, because it's the hormones that are involved, and the medications we know are fine through female physiology. We don't know what they're like through male physiology, and we don't know the effect on the hormones involved, on the baby, and it's not possible to do safe research on that without experimenting on babies, basically.

What we do know is that the amount that a male could produce by inducing lactation is nowhere near enough to sustain a baby. So it is interrupting the breastfeeding relationship between the mother and the baby anyway. So yeah, that's basically what it is. There's not enough research and I don't see how it's possible to, to do anything like enough research to show that it would be safe for the baby.

Julie: So I want to raise another issue and see if you have views on this and if you don't always. 

Many of us, many feminists campaign against the surrogacy trade, as you know, and even when it's supposedly altruistic, it's a trade, it's for money. And increasingly we're being told that single men, whether they're gay or heterosexual, and of course gay male couples, should be allowed to buy a baby this way, otherwise it's anti-gay prejudice, it's homophobia.

Now, the photographs that I've seen of these men in hospital where they're waiting for the actual mother to give birth, they often are in scrubs as though they are either a doctor, a clinician, or an expectant father, waiting to witness a caesarean, a C section of his female partner. And then it's skin to skin contact, immediately, with the baby that they've taken from the mother.

Now, without romanticizing this, and without being sentimental about it, and I'm not a mother, nor have I ever wanted to have children, this seems instinctively wrong to me that a baby would be immediately placed skin to skin with a person who, well, first of all, with a man who will smell differently from the baby's mother. And is it the case that the baby will, of course, got used to sounds and smells and other sensory pointers towards that baby's birth mother? Because so many of us don't really understand the biology around this and what happens when a baby comes out and why that baby needs skin to skin contact. And even why breastfeeding is so, so much better if it's possible, for the baby's health and growth and, as you say, relationship to the mother. 

Katrina: Just that it's very important for the baby to have their gut flora seeded by the mother as well. So the birth of the baby onto the mother's chest, then the colostrum is crucial. And that first few hours really set the baby's immune system up.

And also there is a mother then, a biological mother, whether she's going to hand the baby over or not, who is going to be very uncomfortable with lactating breasts. Within three to four days she will have breasts full of milk and whether she expresses that milk or just dries the milk up, there's a physiological impact on her as well.

Rej: That's a really good point. So babies are born expecting to be put on their mother's chest. That is, I think it's Nils Bergman says that mother's chest is the baby's natural habitat. And I think Katrina said earlier, you know, the needs of babies haven't changed. They are essentially cave babies. They don't know that we live in these secure, centrally heated homes and that they've got a formula that is an acceptable alternative or adequate alternative.

A baby is born expecting to be delivered onto his mother's chest and to breastfeed. And when you separate that and interrupt that, we know it causes a wound. 

In cases now, adoptions in the UK at least, adoption is really rare. Every effort is made to keep baby with mum. It's only in the most extreme cases that babies are removed at birth.

And you're deliberately, in the case of surrogacy, you're deliberately I know that feelings run high about it, but in the case of surrogacy, you are deliberately creating a baby to then create that wound and damage, and we don't know what the effects are psychologically. But yeah, good luck to those people who've commissioned babies and bought babies and we'll have to explain that to them in the impact in however many years’ time.

Ruth: Yeah, something that's kind of related but not entirely is the situation in LLLGB was quite specific in terms of the charity, because our beneficiaries are mothers, mothers and children, and that means something in law. So a surrogate mother is not a mother, as it went up by the surrogate mother, the one who's commissioned the baby, not the one who has born the baby, who is the mother in law.

That was something that, as trustees, going back to that side of things, that we were able to use to try to keep LLLGB, at least, to what our mission is, which is about supporting mothers and babies with breastfeeding and mothering through breastfeeding. And what we did as a council of directors was we got an opinion from KC to find out where we stood, in terms of the policy that we were being told by LLL International that we had to impose compared to what our charitable objects were in LLLGB. 

And what we found out was what we believed to be the case. Which is that trans women, so males, are not the beneficiaries, and trans men, so biological mothers who have given birth to their baby and want to breastfeed, or whatever they want to call it, would still be LLLGB's beneficiaries.

What wasn't so clear, which will hopefully be more clear after the Supreme Court hearing. The results of that comeback is how, how that can be used on the ground in terms of supporting mums. And what, when we became trustees, what one of the things that we hoped to get for the organization was clarity around that. And that is something that we did manage to do, we believe. 

However, the council that is now in place seems to be running from that, trying to pretend it hasn't happened. We had set up a question and answer session with Aqua Reindorf, KC, who wrote the opinion so that anything that wasn't clear could be clarified among those who seems to have a different interpretation of what that opinion said than we did and the new council postponed it. 

 It remains to be seen whether it actually takes place, but that was something which was quite mind boggling because in LLL, December is the time when all leaders have to decide whether they're going to carry on for another year because there's an annual signing of a statement of commitment where you sign up to support mothers to pursue the mission and also to agree with the policies, which rather tricky for some leaders in some parts of the world where it's literally dangerous to do so.

There used to be leaders LLL in Uganda, for example, and there is no longer because it wasn't safe for them to do so with what LLL international is still trying to impose. 

So yeah, we think that we've left clarity, but the new council seem to be trying to fudge it all again.

Katrina, did you want to say something?

Katrina: I'm just thinking about clarity and the language and how a few years ago we were asked to answer a questionnaire on whether we should accept a variety of terms to be more inclusive and I think at the time I don't even know what I said at the time because it was so light-touch, we might use a few more words to encompass everyone's different lived experience.

I may have said fine because ultimately I've always trusted the LL league to do what's right for mothers. But then that we've been reminded, ‘oh, most leaders said it's okay to use a variety of terms’ and yeah, with an individual. woman, if she tells me she identifies as a dad or she wants to use the term chest feeding on a one to one basis, I would absolutely respect that.

But when there's a lack of clarity in language, it makes our written work clunky, which then is open to interpretation. There's a really well known book amongst breastfeeding counsellors and lactation consultants that's on about its third reprint, the first issue of the book absolutely fell apart. I used it so much.

The latest reprint even goes so far, the language is so full of diversity, it even says at one point, ‘the parent should lift the gland’ meaning the mother should lift her breast. And that kind of clunky language, I find that quite offensive really. And it doesn't help us with our clarity and it doesn't help us with our mission.

And. The LL league has always been really careful about not mixing causes and our cause was mother to mother breastfeeding, but this one issue has seemingly overtaken everything else and I'm conscious of the single mother, the mother on a low income, the mother of colour who may be the only one in her community of colour feeling isolated, the deaf mother.

We're not putting the energy into that. And I feel like there's so much we could do for women without this one issue taking precedence over everything else. 

Julie: And, and it has to be said, I think, well, you don't have to agree, but some organisations that deal with the issue of childbirth and breastfeeding and the like, are viewed as very middle class and excluding some working class women who feel judged. This is a very broad sweeping statement, but it's something I'm sure that you've heard before, whether or not it's fair or accurate. 

So just imagining a woman who's working class without a higher education, who hasn't been involved in these luxury beliefs, who doesn't of course have a friend who has a trans child, because we all know where this comes from, where the class demographic is, and Being hit with this nonsense. Well, I mean, it's going to alienate her way more than feeling judged because she has not been keen on the idea of breastfeeding for whatever reason. 

Katrina: Well, a friend of mine told me when I was describing all this to her, this was quite recently, she said, ‘well, I am an ordinary woman’ she said.

‘And. Actually, if I was breastfeeding now’ because her children are all grown up, she said, ‘I, as an ordinary woman, just wouldn't go’ 

Julie: I wonder if we could talk about the way forward and what we can do to support you all and the organisation to get back to its roots. And what are the next steps? Because there'll be lots of women listening to this feeling really angry and upset that it's come to this.

Ruth: Yeah, I think, talk about it, make sure that women know. One thing that we are very concerned about is that women who aren't caught up in this and know what's going on will go along to a meeting, an LLL meeting, or another, the other breastfeeding organizations are all in a very similar position from what we can see, is that they know what they might face when they go along to a meeting. That is so important. 

In terms of the moving forwards, a group of us are working at setting up a new organization that will be mother to mother. That will do what it's supposed to do for a breastfeeding organization, which is support the breastfeeding relationship, which is the mother and the baby. And yes, you can offer information to supporters and let dads know, and grandparents know how to support the mother and baby, but the focus has to be on that dyad, on just those two. 

So we are, these things take time, but we are doing all the paperwork. We are setting up a new organization. As soon as we know what we're going to be called, we will start fundraising. We are working on it. 

And basically, LLL, when it did it right, it was beautiful. It was really life changing for so many mothers supporting choices that they wanted to make but possibly didn't realize because society is so focused. Formula feeding has become what is seen as the norm so that breastfeeding behaviour in babies isn't recognized, it's when you see a baby behaving as babies behave, it's seen as a problem rather than that's what babies do because they need to feed very frequently. It's not that you have a baby and you feed it and put it down for three hours. That's not how babies work. LLL was beautifully set up.

Marian Tompson, resigned recently over this. She was 94. We know that's, this is not what LLL was set up to do because we have a founder who is absolutely amazing and has spoken up to say so. 

So basically what we're going to set up is a mother to mother breastfeeding support organization and we will hopefully come back and talk about that when we can do so with a little bit more information but that's the plan.

Julie: I mean that's an excellent plan and I'm sure we'll all support it and help you raise money for that. And I'm wondering, is there a legal challenge against the organization because it's so important, isn't it? As you've said, it must hurt like hell to feel like you've got to let it go. Is there anything the courts can do in this instance?

Ruth: We don't know. We went to the Charity Commission, who were not exactly helpful, to put it extremely mildly. In the closing letter that they sent to us, they said they did not have a position on whether LLLGB should become more trans inclusive, because as was said earlier, LLL is trans inclusive. LLLGB, if it follows its charitable objects as they are now, is trans inclusive, because it includes biological women who identify as trans.

The Charity Commission should hang their heads in shame. Don't know if anything can be done there. It's certainly something to consider. We need to put our energy where it's most useful for us, which at the moment is setting something new up. But we're holding on to all the valuable stuff that's out there.

Anyone who has been an LLL leader, you can resign, you can retire, but you don't really stop being one because it's about the mother and the baby, it's about supporting mothers. But yes, I, I think it's something that I would hope. might be an option, but I don't think we're necessarily the right people to do that.

Although I would be absolutely willing to talk to anyone about it. Rej? 

Rej: Yeah, I think in terms of legal challenges, that's more likely to be something that comes from a beneficiary who is harmed. It's a dreadful, dreadful fact, but I think as volunteers, there's relatively little one can do.

Ruth and I both, when we were having our little talks about what inclusion should look like, and we were both being accused of being exclusionary, and we brought up the issue of, you know, survivors of domestic violence or sexual abuse or women who are from a religious or cultural background that precludes being in a room with a man. We were both told that if a woman had an issue with a male being in the room, that is her problem and we should organise a one to one with her and carry on running the group, letting in males. 

So I think it, it would be that person, that woman, that mother who says, ‘I need a single sex space. I am your beneficiary. Please guarantee that’ and when they say no, my suspicion it will be that or a safeguarding issue. 

Ruth: Katrina, you've got your hand up, did you want to say something? 

Katrina: I was just thinking about one of the things, just very quickly, you know, if one of the threads has been, if you ask all the mums in the group, if that man can stay, then surely that's fine.

But I don't think women should be put under that pressure. To have to say in front of anybody that they're not happy.

 Over the 20 odd years that I've run my group 22 years, we have had some dads turn up sometimes and we've always welcomed them with a cup of tea and a slice of cake and said right if you need your partner here we'll take you both to one side and chat with you together but if dad would actually rather go and have a nap in the car, we'll give him tea and cake and he can go. Without exception within two minutes of us giving that mum a cup of tea and a conversation she says, you can go, because she feels that that it's a safe space for her.

And so we've always welcome men, but we've welcomed them on the proviso that once we've settled their partner, they can go, and it's never been a problem. And I don't ever want to make the mothers have to be the ones to gate-keep for who comes in. I'm going to do that for them. 

Julie: Absolutely right. And I know that there'll be plenty more publicity and awareness raising about this issue, which I've heard a lot of shock and horror about it. And I'm of course, very sorry it's happened to all of you and to the organization itself. But I do think that this will peak an awful lot of people because it's so outrageous.

Ruth: I went to the Sex Matters lobby day down in London in September and talked to a lot of people about this and quite a lot said that this, of all the things they heard that day, this was the most disturbing, and I think that sums it up quite well, really. 

Julie: It's been a real pleasure talking to all of you and hearing about the spirit of not giving up.

And so I do hope that all of the listeners get riled about it and do something positive in order to help you. And of course, to help the mothers that so desperately need this kind of support. But it's been a real pleasure to get to meet you all.