Until a few weeks ago, most Irish people had probably never heard of the Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland (ALCI) then Catherine Monaghan of Wicklow Women 4 Women became curious about its forthcoming National Conference.
The ALCI was due to hold its National Conference at the Ardilaun Hotel in Galway on 9 and 10 October. Among the speakers was the American lactation consultant Jacob Engelsman, who was scheduled to speak about “lactation support for gender-diverse families”.
Monaghan did some digging. It turned out that Engelsman had previously spoken at Frolicon, an American fetish convention, where one of his presentations was entitled “Inducing Lactation for Kinksters”. His recently published book, Lactation for the Rest of Us, discusses reasons why a man might want to lactate, including feeding a baby, but also for “curiosity, fun, or sexual gratification”.
On 21 August, Genspect published her investigation. What she had found raised a fairly straightforward question. Why on earth had the ALCI booked a man to speak about the womanly art of breastfeeding?
The sexual element raises the question of autogynephilia, a term coined by sexologist Dr Ray Blanchard to describe a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman. Autogynephilia is generally described as a paraphilia and involves arousal at the idea of having female physical characteristics, including breasts and associated behaviour, including breastfeeding. It does not follow that every man who wants to lactate is autogynephilic, but it does mean that sexual motivations cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant when male lactation is being incorporated into professional breastfeeding practice.
The sexual dimension also raises much more serious questions around safeguarding. Under Ireland’s Children First Act 2015, the statutory definition of sexual abuse includes “wilful sexual activity in the presence of the child”. Engelsman has already taught a session that linked lactation with kink, while his book explicitly identifies “sexual gratification” as one possible motivation for induced lactation.
There is a further complication. Nurses and midwives are among the professionals designated as “mandated persons” under the Children First Act. Where a mandated person knows, believes or has reasonable grounds to suspect that a child is being harmed, has been harmed or is at risk of being harmed, the Act imposes reporting obligations to Tusla. Many of the lactation professionals involved in ALCI are also registered nurses and midwives.
For years, male induced lactation had apparently been incorporated into the professional world of lactation consultancy without much controversy. Indeed, back in 2024, on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, we discussed this issue with Helen Joyce and Marian Tompson, one of the founders of La Leche League in 1956, who felt forced to resign from La Leche League at the age of 95 because of the infiltration of trans issues into an organisation founded to support mother-to-child breastfeeding. This began with trans-identified women seeking to breastfeed and then extended to trans-identified men wanting to breastfeed. As Marian Tompson said:
“When women decide to breastfeed it’s because they want to do the best for their baby and know that’s breastfeeding. Instead of simply providing support to mothers — which has always been free, by the way — leaders are now expected to indulge the fantasies of adult males. This is not natural or normal. Nor are our leaders, who are all nursing mothers themselves, prepared to handle it.”
Also in 2024, The Critic published an exposé on the growing inclusion of men in La Leche League Great Britain, including the story of “Gabrielle”, who called himself the “princess mom”:
“He had joined a group for breastfeeding mothers who needed help to produce sufficient milk, where he solicited advice on milk production, simulating pregnancy and birth, and discussed how he might “borrow” a baby to breastfeed — apparently his ‘dream scenario’.”
However, once this issue came to wider public attention in Ireland over the last few weeks, things changed very quickly. Within days, the story had travelled from Genspect into the national press. On 27 August, the Irish Daily Mail devoted a full page to it under the headline: “Speaker who helps men lactate for ‘curiosity or sexual gratification’ is booked for breastfeeding seminar.”
The following day, columnist Brenda Power gave it another full page: “A bloke is pushing male ‘lactation’ for sexual kicks – and yes, we’re paying for it.”
The story gained traction on social media, with old threads from the 2024 scandal gaining further traction, and the Irish Daily Mail continued to highlight this issue.
On 29 August, the controversy made the front page of the Irish Daily Mail as the Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland defended Engelsman’s inclusion, saying training lactation consultants to support diverse families was consistent with equality law and inclusion. Women’s groups announced plans to protest. People contacted the Ardilaun Hotel and local politicians, while pressure mounted on Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill to intervene.
And then the Ardilaun Hotel withdrew as the venue. ALCI paused ticket sales and removed the conference programme and speaker details from its website. The conference now appears to be in limbo. ALCI says it is “currently exploring options.” Will it find another venue? And if it does, will chest-feeding remain on the agenda?
The Irish Daily Mail on Sunday continued with the story yesterday.
Last night, Dr Alice Hodkinson from BiologyinMedicine appeared on GB News and pointed out that if male lactation involves sexual gratification, it constitutes child abuse.
It has been quite the collapse.
Although the Engelsman story is spectacularly strange, it risks obscuring the more interesting question. Ireland’s breastfeeding rates are among the lowest in the world. How did the ALCI ever get to the point where somebody looked at Jacob Engelsman and thought: yes, that’s exactly who Ireland’s lactation consultants need to hear from?
Those of us who have followed the trans issue for years have seen this happen again and again. Most people simply haven’t thought very deeply about any of it and when a strange request arrives, they frown slightly, then nod, and go along to get along.
The Engelsman invitation might look like a sudden and spectacular lapse of judgement. But further research by Wicklow Women 4 Women suggests that ALCI had been travelling in this direction for considerably longer than we first realised. A now-removed post on ALCI’s website, dating from 2019, recorded an ALCI Council member’s impressions after attending a lactation conference in the United States.
Among the sessions the ALCI member attended was “LGBTQ+ and You”, delivered by Stephanie Wagner, an American lactation consultant with a particular interest in “gender-inclusive” lactation care. Wagner’s private practice, EverLatching Love, provides “Breastfeeding/Chestfeeding/Bodyfeeding support and education.”
The ALCI Council member described her education in LGBTQ+ terminology at this US conference and recounted the story of a gay male couple and their adopted baby daughter. According to her account, both men attempted to induce lactation so that they could “chest-feed” the baby.
The ALCI member also explained the terminology she had encountered. “Chest-feeding”, she wrote, could be used for “anatomical, psychological, sexual, or gender reasons” by someone who considered their nipples to be part of a chest rather than a breast and used that part of their body to “comfort and/or nourish a baby”.
Of course, in this Alice in Wonderland world where up is down and down is up, “chest-feeding” typically refers to breastfeeding by testosterone-taking females who identify as men, while oestrogen-taking males who induce breast growth insist that they are “breastfeeding”. The terminology has been carefully arranged so that women lose the word breast, while men acquire it. However I prefer to use “chest-feeding” to describe males producing chemical liquid for babies, since breastfeeding is something mothers do.
This was 2019, seven years before Jacob Engelsman was booked to speak about “lactation support for gender-diverse families” at the Ardilaun Hotel in Galway. Evidently the ALCI Council member who attended conference sessions where male induced lactation — “chest-feeding” — was presented as part of LGBTQ+ lactation care was impressed with the idea and reported what she had learned on ALCI’s own website.
There is an important point to be made here. Males cannot breastfeed. Male and female breasts are not physiologically equivalent. Women are biologically adapted to lactate following pregnancy; men are not. “Chest-feeding” involves chemical ooze being squeezed from a male nipple by an infant.
The male couple in the 2019 story were not women who happened to identify as transgender. They were men attempting to induce lactation in order to feed an adopted baby. They were choosing “chest-feeding” over formula even though the purpose appears to have been to satisfy the adults’ desire to breastfeed, rather than any established benefit to the baby. In males, inducing lactation involves taking hormones and other medications, alongside repeated stimulation of the breast tissue, in an attempt to produce chemical liquid to simulate mother-to-child breastfeeding.
At what point did satisfying an adult male’s desire to “chest-feed” become more important than asking what was best for the baby?
From international conferences to ALCI Council
In 2021 Naomi Hurley joined ALCI Council. Her current profile lists both “LGBTQ+ Lactation” and “Induced Lactation” (the process of stimulating the body to produce breast milk without undergoing a prior pregnancy) among her specialities. Over the following years, Hurley became considerably more influential within the organisation.
By 2024 she was representing ALCI internationally, attending the European Lactation Consultants Alliance (ELACTA) conference and the Lactation Consultants of Great Britain conference, with the latter funded by ALCI. Afterwards, Hurley wrote that attending had given her ideas about “speakers and subjects” that might benefit ALCI members in future.
By February 2025, Mairéad O’Sullivan was President and Hurley was Vice President and ELACTA Representative. By July, Fiona Rea was also publicly identified as an ALCI Council member. After a reshuffle in 2026, O’Sullivan remained President, Fiona Rea became Vice President, Hurley remained on Council and continued representing ALCI internationally, and Áine McGahon-Lavin became Secretary and Education Officer. Meanwhile, somewhere along the line, “LGBTQ+ Lactation” and “Induced Lactation” became professional specialities and searchable categories in ALCI’s consultant directory. Hurley’s own profile lists both. Indeed, a majority of ALCI’s senior Council members now list “LGBTQ+ Lactation” among their professional specialities. Once you know this, Engelsman’s invitation begins to look rather less inexplicable.
According to ALCI, conference speakers are “carefully selected and screened by ALCI Council”. That sentence has become rather awkward, however, because somebody apparently “carefully selected and screened” Jacob Engelsman.
Seen in isolation, Engelsman’s invitation looks bizarre. Seen against this seven-year history, it looks much less surprising. This is often how institutional change happens. What initially looks like an extraordinary departure turns out to have been preceded by years of smaller changes that attracted little attention at the time.
So who screened Jacob Engelsman?
Who invited him? Was the invitation discussed by Council? Which Education Officer was involved? Did anyone read Lactation for the Rest of Us or look at his previous presentation about lactation as a sexual kink at a fetish convention? And what exactly does ALCI mean when it says speakers are “carefully selected and screened”?
These questions go directly to professional governance. ALCI has received HSE funding. Its Council members can participate in national committees and make submissions to government and other agencies. The public has every right to ask how these decisions are being made.
What is remarkable is the speed with which everything unravelled once people outside this professional world saw what was happening. Within ALCI, “gender-diverse lactation” had become sufficiently unremarkable to warrant a session at its National Conference. Outside the ALCI, people reacted rather differently.
Women asked why a professional breastfeeding organisation had invited a speaker who had previously taught lactation as a kink at a fetish convention. Questions were raised about safeguarding. Women’s organisations such as Wicklow Women 4 Women, Women’s Space Ireland, the Natural Women’s Council and the Countess became involved. Politicians such as Peadar Toibín from Aontú spoke up.
The national press arrived. The Ardilaun Hotel pulled out. And the ALCI appears to be having a think about things.
And now, just as people outside the ALCI are looking in, some useful information has disappeared from their website. The 2019 account of the American conference is gone. So too are the names and biographies from its “Council Members” page, which now tells us little more than: “The ALCI council keep the show on the road…” Perhaps there are entirely mundane explanations for all of this. If so, ALCI should explain them. Indeed, it has quite a lot of explaining to do.
We contacted ALCI with a detailed list of questions and invited it to respond. At the time of publication, we had received no reply.
The conference may be in limbo, but the question remains: how did an organisation devoted to supporting breastfeeding mothers reach the point where all of this apparently seemed unremarkable?
Child abuse.
I’m so happy to see the media speaking against this nonsense!