Just to mix things up, let’s start with some news from the Commonwealth of Nations:
- Celia Hannon of the U.K.’s Guardian weighs in on the debate about the merits of lesbian parents vs. straight parents. Her take on the matter is similar to mine, which is that the whole debate about which sexual orientation makes one a “better” parent is rather pointless. “There is nothing about someone’s sexuality that predetermines their skill as a parent. What matters is how you parent, not who you sleep with,” she says. She also gives us what I’m going to designate the Quote of the Week:
The past 50 years have seen us remodel the family as step-families and single parenthood have become commonplace, and women have chosen to have children later and remain in the labour market after doing so. This has been accompanied by profound shifts in our views on what good parenting looks like. The rise of gay families is a part of the next chapter of this change, and it should not be provocative to suggest that there might be things to learn from alternative approaches to parenting and kinship. . . . Some parents are gay and we should get used to it so we can get on with the job of helping all parents raise their children as well as possible.
- Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has become a world pioneer by not immediately attempting to “fix” the genitals of children born with an ambiguous gender, reports The Times (via Queersighted):
As a gynaecologist at University College Hospital, [Sarah Creighton] was the first to set out to compare those whose doctors had, at birth, attempted to “normalise” their genitals, and those who had no surgery. Nobody had followed up on patients in the past, as, cloaked in secrecy, doctors had concealed the truth from parents and child.
But she tracked them down and her groundbreaking study in The Lancet found that those who were left as nature made them fared as well, if not better, than those who had been normalised. Being yourself was more important than being like others. . . .
Creighton’s findings were to start a British-led revolution: first, telling parents the truth about their child’s ambiguous-looking sex and, even more radical, saying that perhaps he or she could stay that way.
- The Canadian Association for the Advancement of Women in Sport and Physical Activity presented the Woodstock Thunder girls’ hockey team with its “Grace Under Pressure” award. Pat Griffin reports, “This is a very prestigious award previously only given to Olympians.” What did the girls do that was so award worthy? They stood up against homophobic comments from some of their opponents when two teammates came out as lesbian. That’s the second anti-homophobia hockey story from Canada in less than a week.
- Combine the above with the two great volumes about LGBT parenting to come out of Canada lately, and one might be tempted to think that the country is on the smooth ice towards understanding and acceptance. Unfortunately, Canada’s border guards recently seized prints of three films meant for an LGBT film festival in Ottawa. No, they weren’t porn. One, Patrik 1.5, is about a gay couple adopting a child in Sweden, and the others seem like fairly tame dramas. All have been shown in Canada before. The guards won’t release them until after they’ve viewed them and deemed them acceptable, which means the film festival was scrambling to find alternative copies.
And in the U.S.:
- TransActive Education & Advocacy has released their “How-To Guide for Oregon Public & Charter Schools,” with information on how schools everywhere can support transgender children and youth and those who express their gender identity in non-conforming ways. (Here are a few related resources.)
- Nancy Polikoff reports that the Jenkins-Miller custody case is now not the only one in which Virginia has enforced custody orders from another state. It just did so in the case of a surrogate mother trying to deny parental rights to the nonbiological father of the gay couple for whom she was a surrogate.
- Polikoff also tells us of the happy case of Kellie Gibson and Denise Boettcher, who finalized their adoption of four-year-old Morrgan Avery Gibson-Boettcher and are likely the first lesbian couple in the state to adopt a child jointly. She also explains how a previous custody ruling (another one in which an “ex-gay” bio mom tried to deny parenthood to her ex partner) helped this one.