In the latest Atlantic, Hanna Rosin writes an interesting, in-depth piece on the tyranny of nursing culture. A mother of three, Rosin is starting to resent the pressure to breast-feed:

From the moment a new mother enters the obstetrician's waiting room, she is subjected to the upper-class parents' jingle: "Breast Is Best." Parenting magazines offer "23 Great Nursing Tips," warnings on "Nursing Roadblocks," and advice on how to find your local lactation consultant (note to the childless: yes, this is an actual profession, and it's thriving). Many of the stories are accompanied by suggestions from the ubiquitous parenting guru Dr. William Sears, whose Web site hosts a comprehensive list of the benefits of mother's milk. "Brighter Brains" sits at the top: "I.Q. scores averaging seven to ten points higher!" (Sears knows his audience well.) The list then moves on to the dangers averted, from infancy on up: fewer ear infections, allergies, stomach illnesses; lower rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease. Then it adds, for good measure, stool with a "buttermilk-like odor" and "nicer skin"-benefits, in short, "more far-reaching than researchers have even dared to imagine."

But, says Rosin, the facts just don't support the mania.

The medical literature looks nothing like the popular literature. It shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls. A couple of studies will show fewer allergies, and then the next one will turn up no difference. Same with mother-infant bonding, IQ, leukemia, cholesterol, diabetes.

More to the point, Rosin argues that the breastfeeding debate takes place in a vacuum, without considering the cost to the mother and her marriage. In her opinion, it almost single-handedly sabotages the high-minded ideal of equal labor division between husband and wife, and the benefits can be outweighed by the stresses: "if a breast-feeding mother is miserable, or stressed out, or alienated by nursing, as many women are, if her marriage is under stress and breast-feeding is making things worse, surely that can have a greater effect on a kid's future success than a few IQ points." In conclusion, she argues that while breast may be best, "it seems reasonable to put breast-feeding's health benefits on the plus side of the ledger and other things-modesty, independence, career, sanity-on the minus side, and then tally them up and make a decision."

Given the responses the discussion the piece has generated on Slate's XX site, clearly Rosin has struck a chord with moms who resent the class-burdened pressure to reject any nursing alternative. And given its status as the inarguable central tenet of modern parenting, a backlash was probably inevitable. Jill Lepore recently discussed the tyranny of the breast pump; Rosin has taken the argument a defiant step further, and clearly the time is nigh.

What we're always struck by in reading these debates is how impossible consensus will ever be. Think about it: it's a subject about which no mother can be objective. Who is prepared to admit she's not doing the best for her child, whatever that means? From defensive "well-you-turned-out-fine-with-formula" arguments of prior generations to the sanctimony of helicopter parents to the pragmatism of the new backlashers, the one thing you can know for sure is that everyone has an agenda. However good and removed a journalist, how can a mother separate the discussion from her own experience - and why should she? As Rosin says, the argument cannot exist in a vacuum, but as a result the discussions are ultimately personal. Someone who's childless is likely to be patronized with "you don't understand" smugness, whereas an experienced mother's experience is going to be colored by particulars. To those of us without children, we're struck less by the particulars of the debate than the fact that, for women, it's unavoidable, a cultural controversy from which one can't opt out. Many politically charged issues nowadays are somewhat optional; feeding your baby is not, and that women are inescapably wrapped up in something both personal and political - by virtue of one of the most natural human processes in the world - is the biggest irony of all.

The Case Against Breast-Feeding [Atlantic]

Related: Baby Food [New Yorker]

Earlier: Milky Way: The Long, Strange History Of Breastfeeding

Despite serious consequences from their friends and relatives (Brandon's best friend, Abby, is the child of Evangelical parents who now forbid her to play with him), Tina has encouraged Brandon to embrace being a girl, and Brandon is now living as Bridget. And experts are still debating over whether this is the proper direction to take.

Earlier this year we covered a two-part NPR story about transgender children. The first part compared and contrasted two children who felt they were born to the wrong gender — Bradley and Jonah. Bradley's parents were trying to get him to act like a stereotypical boy, while Jonah's parents were allowing him to live as Jona, a girl. The second part was about an aggressive new treatment that allows transgender preteens to block puberty so that they do not have to develop the secondary sex characteristics of the gender they feel is not truly theirs. Rosin covers much of the same ground as these stories and interviews some of the same experts, and she also explores the issue of whether or not being transgender is biological. She comes up with a slightly different, and fascinating, conclusion from the NPR stories.

She interviewed Catherine Tuerk, a woman who runs a support group for transgender parents in D.C. and is the mother of a gay son. Tuerk noticed that many conservative parents were surprisingly comfortable labeling their children as transgender, and she had the following theory: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.” In one case study, a 17-year-old girl requesting cross-sex hormones told her doctor, “Doc, to be honest, lesbians make me sick … I want to be normal.”

As I said when I first wrote about the issue of transgender children, most of these parents just want to do right by their children, who are obviously suffering greatly. Above all, what one comes away with from Rosin's story is that even for a child like Brandon/Bridget, whose mother is letting her live as the gender she feels she is, the road is a rocky one filled with tough transitions and outside prejudice.

A Boy's Life [The Atlantic]

Earlier Transgender Boys Take Different, Provocative Paths
Controversial Treatment Allows Transgender Children To Delay Puberty

Related:

I also don't find Tien's honesty "brave," I find it sad. When you share your life with someone, of course you will be frequently annoyed by them. But, beneath those frequent irritations, there is a deep affection, one that's so thickly layered that it's difficult to describe publicly without feeling you've betrayed your partner, or belittled your shared emotions by attempting to explain them in a way that's accessible to others.

Rosin describes the beginning of Tien's piece — it's "a portrait of her bumbling fool of a husband, who lies, always says exactly the wrong thing, scratches his armpit at a parent-teacher conference and then 'absently smells his fingers.'" To publicly denigrate someone you ostensibly still love in that way is kind of scary to me. Why is she staying with someone she doesn't publicly respect? Tien also writes that "Beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of of our marriage — Everymarriage — runs the silent chyron of divorce." It seems like for her, the chyron is silent but deadly.

Divorce Anyone? [Slate]

Earlier: Slate Power Couple Attempts To Stay Within 15 Feet Of Each Other For 24 Hours

Onto the reflection: Rosin missed being able to tell her husband about what happened during her day — because her day was now their day — while both husband and wife found that they appreciated each other in new and subtle ways, which is not to say that they weren't thrilled to get away from each other by the end of the experiment. The Roach-McNally-esque stunt was both amusing and enlightening, and below is a video diary of Plotz and Rosin's experience. My favorite part is when Plotz says, in response to his wife's gentle mocking about his diet soda hissy, "You're new to the Fresca issue."

On A Short Leash [Slate]

Earlier: Sexless Monk Marriage Appears To Verge On Giving World The Next "Virgin Birth"