What Is Milk? The Jasmine Sussex Case, Five Years On

The following story is not unlike others I have written about before. Our culture has managed something remarkable in a short space of time. It has taken a fact that would have drawn no dispute a decade ago, one confirmed in any hospital ward, any midwifery textbook, any ordinary conversation between mothers, and made saying it aloud a live legal risk.

A decade ago, nobody needed a tribunal to confirm that only women breastfeed.

Today, saying so in public can cost a volunteer her role, her social media accounts, and five years of complaints, censorship requests, conciliation and tribunal proceedings.

This is the story of Jasmine Sussex, and of a case that is still, five years on, no closer to resolution.

Jasmine Sussex spent nearly twenty years associated with the Australian Breastfeeding Association, including approximately fifteen years as a volunteer breastfeeding counsellor. It is the kind of unpaid, unglamorous work that mostly happens at three in the morning on a phone line, talking a frightened new mother through a blocked duct or a baby who will not latch. She is a mother of three herself.

That is the relevant biography: a woman who spent fifteen years helping other women feed their children, until the ABA let her go in 2021, after an internal dispute over whether counsellors should adopt gender-neutral terms such as "chestfeeding" and "human milk feeding" in place of "breastfeeding" and "mother."

Five years of process

In 2019, a Queensland paramedic named Jennifer Buckley, who had begun transitioning two years earlier, took hormones, including the anti-nausea drug domperidone, to attempt to induce lactation ahead of the birth of a son, conceived through IVF using Buckley's own sperm with wife Sandi. According to Buckley's own account, reported in The Australian in November 2025, the fluid produced was frozen and fed to the baby in the hours after his birth, before switching, within days, to formula.

In 2021, on the ABA's Facebook page, Ms Sussex responded to Buckley's public account of the experience by suggesting Buckley was a man pretending to be a woman. That post, and others over the following two years, including posts describing male attempts at induced lactation as experimental and, in some instances, as driven by adult desire rather than infant need, are what Buckley says amounted to vilification under Queensland's Anti-Discrimination Act 1991.

In November 2023, the Queensland Human Rights Commission notified Ms Sussex that Buckley had lodged a vilification complaint. Conciliation and mediation failed, and the matter was subsequently referred to QCAT. In June 2026, the two sides were back before the tribunal, not for a hearing on the substance, but arguing an appeal over whether Buckley should be compelled to produce medical evidence about what, exactly, was in the fluid fed to the baby.

A single tribunal member is reported to have already ruled that question irrelevant to whether Ms Sussex's comments amounted to vilification. QCAT reserved its decision on that appeal, and as of July 2026 no ruling had been published. Ms Sussex, represented by HRLA's John Steenhof, with Anthony Morris KC as counsel, is appealing the earlier ruling.

Five years after the public dispute began, the underlying vilification claim remains unresolved, while the parties are still contesting what evidence the tribunal should even be permitted to consider.

Under section 124A of Queensland's Anti-Discrimination Act 1991, the tribunal is not formally being asked to define milk. It is being asked whether Ms Sussex's public comments incited hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule on the ground of gender identity, and if so, whether they were nonetheless expressed reasonably and in good faith as part of scientific or public-interest discussion. That distinction matters. It is how a disagreement about biology, evidence, and infant welfare becomes a legal examination of language, motive, proportionality, and permissible speech.

Made male and female

Before I go further into the tribunal record, I want to say plainly what I believe, because burying a conviction inside neutral-sounding prose is its own kind of dishonesty.

Scripture opens with a deliberate act, not an afterthought: God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27). Not one undifferentiated kind of human being, later subdivided by accident. Two, distinct, both bearing that image fully, and neither one a substitute for the other. Among the sex-specific capacities woven into that design is the capacity to gestate, give birth, and nourish a child from her own body.

Not every woman will be able to exercise every part of that capacity, whether through illness, surgery, or the ordinary difficulties of lactation, and those who cannot are no less women or mothers for it. But the capacity itself belongs to the female reproductive order. It is not a social role distributed according to identity or desire, available to whichever parent would like the experience of it, and I think treating it as one option among several gets the order of things backwards.

That conviction does not settle the medical question on its own, and I am not going to pretend it does.

A contested question, not a settled one

This is where I want to be careful, because the temptation in a piece like this is to reach for certainty the evidence does not actually offer. Ms Sussex's legal team has put expert evidence to the tribunal, reportedly including a report from a paediatrician, arguing that fluid expressed from a male chest under this kind of hormonal regime bears little resemblance to milk produced by a lactating woman. That is a strong claim, and it is contested. Buckley's own endocrinologist, Naomi Achong, has told The Australian that she has induced lactation in a number of transgender-identifying patients with what she describes as uniformly positive outcomes.

The published research base, however, remains thin. The Royal Australian College of GPs' special-interest lead on transgender healthcare, Vivian Praeger, has taken a more cautious position, saying the available case reports do not establish either the long-term safety or the possible risks to infants, and that, in her assessment as of mid-2026, the practice is not endorsed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.

The honest position, then, is not that nothing is known, nor that the question has been settled. A small number of published case reports show that medically induced lactation can occur, and that a milk-like fluid containing recognised nutritional components can be produced. The first, published in 2018, reported enough induced lactation to serve as an infant's sole nourishment for six weeks before supplementation began.

A 2024 case described direct breastfeeding continuing for three months after birth, before being discontinued because the hormone adjustments and feeding regimen had become physically and psychologically taxing, alongside concerns about the parent's age, health, and the demands of caring for a newborn.

Another 2024 case ended after two weeks, because production remained low and the infant experienced suckling difficulties of his own. Small case reports like these can generate hypotheses and offer limited reassurance. They cannot, by themselves, establish long-term safety, consistent nutritional equivalence or a clinically validated protocol.

It is worth noting, too, that the very first published case, the one most often cited as a breakthrough, was also the subject of direct bioethical criticism at the time. A Hastings Center bioethicist argued that the risks to the infant were unjustified given a safe alternative, bottle-feeding, already existed, and questioned whether any clinical trial to establish safety could ever be run ethically. That critique was published within weeks of the case becoming public, and the underlying question has not really been answered since. It has simply been overtaken by more case reports.

But even taking Dr Achong's account at its most generous, what she is describing is not the ordinary physiology of maternal lactation that Ms Sussex spent fifteen years supporting, following pregnancy and birth. It is medically induced lactation, pursued through exogenous hormones, domperidone, and sustained mechanical stimulation, chasing an outcome that female physiology produces through its own hormonal cascade after childbirth.

Domperidone is available by prescription in Australia for certain gastrointestinal conditions, but its use to induce lactation is off-label. In the United States, it is not FDA-approved for any human indication. The FDA says its effectiveness in stimulating lactation has not been established and warns of serious cardiac events in the person taking it. A 2023 review also identified a potential association between discontinuing or tapering high-dose domperidone and severe neuropsychiatric effects, including suicidal ideation. Separately, the FDA warns that the drug is excreted in milk and may expose a nursing infant to unknown risks.

None of that proves that every medically supervised use is unsafe. It does establish that the regimen carries recognised uncertainties and risks that should not be brushed aside when the intended recipient of the resulting fluid is a newborn who cannot consent. It has not, on the evidence so far, been shown to be equivalent to maternal milk, and I think the burden of showing equivalence sits with the party making that claim, not with a woman asking for evidence before mothers are told there is no meaningful difference.

It is worth noting, too, that Dr Achong's own justification for the practice cites “extended benefits… to both parents,” not only to the infant. When a benefit to the parent and a benefit to the child are weighed as though they carry equal evidentiary weight in deciding what is medically appropriate for a newborn, something has already gone wrong with the ordering of priorities, whatever anyone believes about the underlying biology.

What is not contested is this: a woman who spent fifteen years supporting breastfeeding mothers said publicly that she did not believe a man's body could replicate what a mother's body does. And five years later, she is still arguing, tribunal filing by tribunal filing, for the right to have said so.

The same standard, both directions

I want to be consistent about what principle is actually at stake here, because it is not really about whether Ms Sussex is right about the biology. It is about whether the state should be in the business of adjudicating contested empirical and moral claims through vilification law, rather than through argument, evidence, and the ordinary friction of public disagreement. That standard has to run in both directions or it is not a standard at all.

If it would trouble us to see a tribunal spend years deciding whether a Christian’s public claim about, say, the nature of marriage or the beginning of life amounted to vilification, it should trouble us just as much to watch the same machinery grind for years over a claim about lactation. I do not think either kind of claim should be settled by regulatory attrition. The immediate free-speech question is not only who is right. It is whether contested claims, honestly held and evidenced as best anyone currently can, may be spoken without triggering a process that consumes years of the child's life before the underlying claim is ever heard.

None of this argument depends on a reader sharing my theological premises. A secular liberal committed to evidentiary rigour and free expression, or a biologist with no religious conviction at all, can reach the same conclusion from entirely different premises: that contested empirical claims should be tested by evidence and argument, not settled by which side can outlast the other in a tribunal, and that a newborn's welfare should not be treated as a secondary consideration to an adult's experience. I hold this position as a Christian. I do not think you need to be one to hold it too.

Every person in this story

Jasmine Sussex is not reducible to her public statements alone. She is a mother who gave fifteen years to an unpaid vocation because she believed, rightly in my view, that breastfeeding matters and that the women doing it deserve support. Jennifer Buckley is not reducible to a legal complainant, or to being at the centre of an ideologically fraught case, either. Buckley has spent years inside the same grinding tribunal process as Sussex. Sussex and Buckley both bear the image of God, and that dignity does not depend on either of them being right about the biology in dispute.

But dignity for the adults in this story is a different question from what serves the child, and I do not think the two should be allowed to blur into one another. A newborn cannot advocate for his own welfare. He cannot weigh a parent's desired experience of nurture against his own need for nourishment whose safety and adequacy have been responsibly established, and he cannot be asked, later, whether the arrangement was worth it to him.

Whatever compassion I owe Buckley as a person carrying the same fallen nature I do, and I do owe that, I do not think it extends to treating an adult's desired experience of parenthood as though it carries the same weight as an infant's actual welfare when the two are put on the same set of scales.

What I am asking

I am asking whether a newborn's nutritional welfare should ever be weighed as secondary to an adult's desire for a particular experience of parenthood, however sincerely felt. I am asking whether Australians can still say plainly that female physiology carries a capacity to nourish children which medically induced lactation has not been shown to replicate, without a tribunal spending half a decade deciding whether saying so is against the law. And I am asking what it does to a country's capacity for honest disagreement when defending a newborn's interests ahead of an adult's desired experience of parenthood is treated as the more dangerous position to hold.

“Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother's breast.”  —  Psalm 22:9

The Psalms locate the beginnings of human trust at a mother's breast, not because every mother will be able to breastfeed, but because maternal nourishment is presented here as an image of dependence, protection, and created order. That detail was not incidental to the psalmist. Nor is it incidental now, five years into a dispute over whether Australians may still speak plainly about motherhood, biological difference, and the welfare of children.

Thank you for reading.

God bless,

Mark