Academic who claims trans womens’ milk is as good as breast milk has taxpayer funding

Apr 8, 2024 by Jill

by Charlotte Gill, Telegraph:

Kate Luxion appeared on the BBC to defend NHS trust which said it was acceptable for trans women to feed babies via drug-induced lactation.

An academic who told the BBC that trans womens’ milk is as good as breast milk has had a PhD project funded by the taxpayer.

Kate Luxion, a research fellow in creative global health, appeared on the BBC in February this year to defend an NHS trust which said it was acceptable for trans women to feed babies via drug-induced lactation.

Ms Luxion claimed that trans milk is “at least [as good as] if not higher quality” than its natural equivalent and that “the baseline of what would be in a trans mother’s blood is going to be about the same as what would be in a cisgender mother’s blood… There’s actually not a physiological difference in terms of people who are assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth – all have mammary tissue”.

Ms Luxion’s PhD project, Legacies and Futures, at UCL, is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), a subsidiary of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a non-governmental body sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The UKRI website states that it invests £8bn of taxpayers’ money each year into research and innovation.

The Legacies and Futures project says it will investigate “similarities and differences between lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, nonbinary, intersex, and/or transgender (LGBTQIA+) pregnant persons and heterosexual pregnant persons whose gender matches with their assigned sex at birth (cisgender).” It is not known where the project is in its timeline but the website indicates Luxion’s PhD is currently underway.

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