Koda Wert is a stay-at-home dad whose chest isn’t just fat tissue; it feeds his son.

More well-known as breastfeeding, the term chestfeeding essentially carries the same meaning. Chestfeeding means providing a baby with milk from one’s chest, except it is phrased in a gender-neutral way. The term is commonly used amongst communities of trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people who might experience gender dysphoria around the term “breast.”

Wert is a trans man based in South Carolina. In July 2022, he gave birth to his son.

“I knew I wanted children long before I ever got pregnant,” said Wert, who in the very beginning of his transition hated to even imagine himself chestfeeding. “I am a man now, right? Why would I ever do something so strictly gendered towards women? But as time went on and I became comfortable in my identity, the idea didn’t sound so bad.”

To his surprise, trans people questioned Wert’s validity as a trans man, even those within the community. He said, “it added another layer of difficulty that I think other parents should take into consideration before making their own choice.”

Conversations around chestfeeding have circulated among the transmasculine community for many years. Over a decade ago, Trevor MacDonald made rounds on the internet as a trans father who publicly spoke out about his experience chestfeeding his child. In a 2012 Huffington Post article, MacDonald shared how top surgery still allowed for chestfeeding—even if limited.

He writes in the piece: “Following a natural birth, my midwife assisted me in latching on my newborn, Jacob. To everyone’s delight and amazement, we could all hear him enjoying his first swallows of colostrum, the rich milk full of protective antibodies that is produced in the first days after birth.”

Ioannis Ntanos, a UK-based surgeon who specializes in top surgery tells Reckon that typically, the main goal of top surgery is to create a flat projection of the chest area. Hence, most top surgeries aim to remove the breast tissue in its entirety, though not as drastic as a mastectomy. Ultimately, top surgery procedures inhibit the ability to chestfeed.

“There are other options available which leave some of the tissue behind and where chest feeding would be possible, but this would be a bilateral breast reduction—which does not result in a flat projection,” Ntanos said. “The surgeon could attempt to avoid the milk ducts when carrying out keyhole procedures, but after pregnancy (or lactation in cases of surrogacy) the chest would likely remain swollen even after the chest feeding has been completed.”

In 2016, MacDonald, who had already been documenting his journey as a nursing father since 2011 in his blog Milk Junkies, published a tell-all memoir titled Where’s the Mother? about his experience of pregnancy and chestfeeding as a trans man. In an interview with Rewire News Group, MacDonald opened up about being able to produce only a quarter of the milk his son needed and how he turned to his community to supplement the rest.

“From a Mormon donor to a military family to a Mennonite family, all these different kinds of families from different backgrounds came together to help us feed our baby,” he told Rewire News Group. “It was amazing to meet these different people and to realize that despite us being a different kind of family in this one particular way, what was most important to all these people was that a baby needed breast milk.”

For Wert, cost was the main factor in deciding to chestfeed. He said, “I knew chestfeeding would be cheaper than buying formula and that automatically made it a very appealing idea. But the thing that really drew me in was that I discovered that I liked my chest a lot more when it was doing something useful. How could I hate a part of my body that directly nourished my child?”

Despite over a decade of transmasculine parents having discussions around chestfeeding, the topic remains to attract many critics. Some are as recent as this year.

Earlier this January, Tanius Posey, known to one million TikTok followers as transking30 faced backlash for posting about his journey on the popular app. Posey is also a trans man who gave birth this year and shares his experience chestfeeding.

“I got a lot of backlash, and it got the best of me real bad [at first],” Posey said in an interview with Pink News, where he mentioned comments that questioned his integrity as a dad who is trans and how his parenting will corrupt his child. “My child has to eat. I can’t sit there and starve him. He’s gotta eat and he doesn’t take a bottle, so I’ve got to feed him. We gotta stop living under a rock, we’ve gotta open up our eyes and realize there’s more than one way to live.”

To Posey’s luck, it seems as though things are changing. Last month, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) offered new guidance on chestfeeding that included LGBTQ-inclusive advice.

The CDC’s page on Health Equity Considerations in Infant and Young Child Feeding notes that “transgender and nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth and breastfeed or feed at the chest (chestfeed).” In a section on “Breastfeeding” and “Breast Surgery,” the CDC notes that transgender and nonbinary parents can feed children, as long as the healthcare providers working with the families are “familiar with medical, emotional, and social aspects of gender transitions to provide optimal family-centered care and meet the nutritional needs of the infant.”

Wert hopes for the world of healthcare and parenting to gain awareness, research and empathy for families of all kinds. At the moment, he seeks to pursue top surgery in the future, but not until he feels completely done having kids. All in all, Wert, like many parents—trans or not—simply wants to be good to his children.

“The biggest misconception [around chestfeeding] is this pervasive belief that no man would ever willingly chestfeed their baby,” he said. “If every single cis man woke up tomorrow with the ability to chestfeed, [I believe] a good chunk of them would choose to do so.”