There’s a bloke named Jacob Engelsman, a US-based IBCLC lactation consultant who specializes [sic] in supporting LGBTQ+ and gender-diverse families, including helping non-gestational parents (including trans and cis men) induce lactation. He’s scheduled to speak at the Association of Lactation Consultants Ireland’s October conference in Galway, on a session about gender-affirming clinical spaces.
Read that again. Slowly this time.
A man who has never breastfed a baby is booked to teach the people who help women breastfeed babies how to talk about breastfeeding babies. Male lactation, in other words, is now on the professional development syllabus. The sentence should trouble you exactly as much as the institution booking him hopes it won’t.
Fundamentally. He's brought the gall of it a long way to get to Galway.
Anyway. That hope rests on nobody asking why. So ask why. As some might say, he’s, you know, milking it.
The Booking Nobody Explained.
Anyway. ALCI’s autumn programme has always covered the practical business of getting milk into infants — donor supply, medication safety, the WHO code on formula marketing. Useful stuff. Earned stuff.
This year, alongside it, sits Jacob Engelsman: two sessions, and a professional background — by his own CV and campaigners’ reporting — that includes no midwifery or medical training, five years’ certification, and a previous talk titled “Inducing Lactation for Kinksters” at an Atlanta fetish convention.
Now. Simple question. What changed between last year’s programme and this one?
The answer isn’t a mystery. It’s a choice — and choices, unlike accidents, have reasons behind them. Engelsman’s own reasoning is where those answers start. Well. If they ever do.
This isn’t one activist’s reading of a promotional post. Two separate Irish outlets have independently reported the booking, and Senator Sharon Keogan has gone on the record calling it exactly what it is.
“Pure ideological insanity.”
Whatever else is contested here, the booking itself isn’t.
What He Actually Says.
You see. Engelsman’s own book supplies the part ALCI’s promotional posts leave out — quoted at length here.
Asked why a man might want to induce lactation, he doesn’t lead with the baby. He leads with the man, and the order he chooses tells you where his priorities actually sit.
“Usually to feed and bond with their baby and to a lesser extent for curiosity, fun, or sexual gratification.”
That’s his sentence, not mine. Sit with the order of it. Feeding comes first on the list and last in the reasoning — a courtesy mention before the real motive gets its turn.
Which is the exact opposite of how every mother in Ireland approaches the same question. And, I suggest. Pretty much everywhere else in the world. To be fair.
I double dare you to compare that with why women breastfeed. They breastfeed because it’s good for the baby. I mean. Like, who knew? That’s the whole list.
No woman has ever pumped at 3am for the fun of it. Which raises the obvious question of who is actually being served by ALCI’s decision to give this a platform at all.
Maybe, there’s a side gig — like at the Edinburgh Festival. Except for kinksters. With feeding your baby while being flogged. For instance.
Follow the Money.
HSE grant funding, membership fees, and conference income built ALCI’s programme. None of that funding exists to give a platform to a man’s curiosity about his own body.
It exists because Ireland has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in Europe. Women need practical help, not a case study in adult validation.
Yet. Somebody chose this booking. Was it after several Guinnesses? One will never know.
However. Somebody approved the programme. Somebody disabled the comments when the pushback arrived. Every one of those decisions had a name attached to it — even if that name refuses to appear in the promotional copy.
Institutions don’t drift into positions like this. They’re steered there. Possibly crashed, one unchallenged decision at a time. The steering always has a destination, which brings us to the person with the least say in any of it.
The Baby Nobody’s Talking About.
Okay. Here’s the bit the session titles are engineered to avoid: a baby cannot consent to being fed an untested, drug-induced secretion produced by a man whose own book records readers asking him whether the process is “okay” to find “sexy.”
Sit with this for a second. Not the argument — just the picture. In Engelsman’s own book, one case study ends with him trying to get his baby to latch “in a dark room when she was sleeping.” The baby still refused. Nobody in that sentence is having fun. Read it again and notice how quiet it is.
Formula exists. The baby’s mother, in almost every case, exists. The alternative to established, evidenced feeding methods is not urgently needed — it’s being manufactured a need. Manufactured needs always trace back to somebody’s incentive rather than anybody’s necessity.
Whether that’s deliberate strategy or bureaucratic momentum matters less than the outcome. Most institutional dysfunction isn’t malice; it’s a professional class following the incentive in front of it — grants, relevance, the appearance of progressiveness — and mistaking that incentive for principle.
ALCI didn’t set out to sideline mothers. It simply never stopped to ask whether platforming Engelsman served them.
Three Questions.
Is it practical? No — a practice requiring months of pharmaceutical intervention to produce drops of untested liquid solves no breastfeeding problem Ireland currently has.
That answers the first question cleanly, and the second follows straight from it. Is it logical? No — a body funded to improve outcomes for breastfeeding women and babies is spending its conference slot on a man who, by his own account, sometimes does this for fun.
Which leaves the third, and the third is the one that actually matters going forward. What’s the likely outcome? A watered-down category — “people who lactate” — that quietly strips the specificity mothers rely on when they ask for help. Language built to avoid ever mentioning the word “woman.”
That outcome isn’t hypothetical. It’s already the direction of travel. Not the Guinness this time. Nobody drinks that much. This is something colder — momentum, with nobody left holding the glass.
Where This Leaves Women.
I think, even hope, I can say with a reasonable amount of unprofessional certainty, that, every mother who’s battled cracked nipples and cluster feeding at 4am because it’s best for her baby deserves a lactation sector built around her.
Not one that platforms a man’s curiosity and calls it inclusion. Women are entitled to boundaries. Babies are entitled to have their welfare sit above an adult’s desire for validation. ALCI had every opportunity to explain why this booking respects either. Or, in another person’s view, perhaps, doesn’t.
They were given that opportunity by campaigners who raised these concerns directly. They declined to take it — which tells you almost everything the promotional posts were designed not to.
Jacob Engelsman doesn’t breastfeed. He never has. Ireland’s lactation body booked him anyway, funded him anyway, and hoped nobody would read the small print. Like. You know, refunds are not available. Perhaps.
Well. What do you know! Somebody did.
Why did ALCI book him? Because nobody with the power to ask stopped long enough to. That’s the whole answer. It was never more complicated than that.
However, Engelsman didn’t invent the trend — he just got there first. Every trend that starts somewhere ends up somewhere else entirely. Feck Hall, never one to let a linguistic frontier go unclaimed, has already found where this one ends.
For anyone new here: Feck Hall is The Almighty Gob’s own fictional stately home — the satirical address where institutional nonsense goes to be dissected in full costume. Consider what follows the natural next stop on Engelsman’s own trend, played out to its logical end.
So. In A World First. Feck Hall Announces Breakthrough: Introducing “Female Semen.”
The Almighty Gob can reveal that Feck Hall’s newly appointed Director of Inclusive Biological Nomenclature, Dr. Rupert Chuffington-Squit, has this week unveiled what he calls “the last great linguistic injustice in reproductive science” — the total absence of a gender-neutral term for female ejaculate.
It’s the kind of gap that only becomes visible once you’ve already accepted the premise Engelsman’s booking depends on: that precision in language is itself the problem.
“For too long,” Dr. Chuffington-Squit told an audience of one visibly confused peacock in the Feck Hall orangery, “we have allowed biology to be gendered by biology itself. This ends now.”
His proposal — “female semen” — has already been fast-tracked for inclusion in the Feck Hall Style Guide, sitting comfortably alongside chestfeeding, front hole, and menstruator, three terms he describes as “not going far enough.” Inclusive terminology, on his account, has barely started.
The Case For.
Dr. Chuffington-Squit’s reasoning, laid out across a forty-slide PowerPoint nobody requested, rests on a simple premise: if a word describes a bodily fluid, someone somewhere will eventually feel excluded by it.
His solution is not to clarify language. It is to dissolve it entirely, one syllable at a time, until every sentence about the human body requires a translator, a lawyer, and a lie-down.
“Semen” was, historically, one of the few nouns in the English language doing exactly one job. Dr. Chuffington-Squit considers this a design flaw rather than a feature.
“Precision is just exclusion wearing a lab coat,” he said, before adding that his next paper will address the “deeply troubling cisnormativity” of the word umbilical — a sentence that would sound like satire anywhere except inside an institution that has already booked Engelsman.
A follow-up symposium, he confirmed, will interrogate the uncertainty embedded in the very first syllable — the “Um” in umbilical — which he describes as “linguistically non-committal at best, and frankly a bit shifty.”
Nobody at Feck Hall, notably, has yet asked who signed off on “men” sitting quietly inside “semen“ all along. Dr. Chuffington-Squit was unavailable for comment on that particular oversight.
There was once, we believe, a proposal to change “semen” to “secum.” However. When it was subsequently discovered that, sonically, this term would likely cause problems with the estate of a former Welsh Goon Show celebrity, it was quickly dropped.
What This Means for You.
Nothing. It means nothing for you.
However, it will mean a great deal for the seventeen consultants Feck Hall intends to hire to explain it, the taxpayer-adjacent grant body funding the explanation, and the conference — provisionally titled Fluid Dynamics: Rethinking What Comes Naturally — where Dr. Chuffington-Squit will deliver the keynote from a chaise longue.
Feck Hall has not clarified what, biologically, female semen refers to. Asked directly, Dr. Chuffington-Squit called the question “reductive,” “a bit rude,” and “exactly the kind of thing a journalist would ask” — an insult that landed, as these things always do at Feck Hall, several rooms away from anyone who cared.
That refusal to answer isn’t an accident either. It’s the same refusal ALCI gave when asked to explain their own booking.
The Almighty Gob understands Feck Hall is now accepting submissions for the 2027 Inclusive Nomenclature Symposium. Topics under consideration include gender-neutral terms for afterbirth, colostrum, and, per one leaked memo, “the concept of a father.”
Engelsman got there first. Feck Hall’s Dr. Chuffington-Squit just gave the rest of the trend its next word — and neither of them, notably, has yet explained it to the people actually left holding the baby.
The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent mayoral candidate in 2016 and 2021, and one of Bristol’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Writing since 2010, well over 1,000 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.
© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved. Maybe, some lefts. Who knows? I only write the stuff.
Oh, and by the way. Feck Hall and all characters appearing within it, including Dr. Rupert Chuffington-Squit, are fictional creations © 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. Any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental and satirical in intent.
Sources & citations:
Association of Lactation Consultants Ireland (ALCI), official site — alcireland.ie
Gript: “ALCI guest speaker: ‘Trans-women can also induce lactation’” — gript.ie
Gript: “Senator Keogan slams ‘ideological insanity’ of ALCI” — gript.ie
Genspect / Catherine Monaghan: “Where Does Male Lactation Fit in Breastfeeding Support Networks?” — genspect.substack.com (source of the direct book excerpts, the original reporting that surfaced this story, and the header image — independently unverified against the physical text)
Jacob Engelsman, Lactation for the Rest of Us: A Guide for Queer and Trans Parents and Helpers — Amazon listing
Wikidata entity references: The Almighty Gob (Q139935107); John Langley (Q139934957); Sharon Keogan (Q89340000).