Most LGBTQ families we see in the media are middle class, if not wealthier. The reality is more varied, however, and one queer mom has recently shared what life is like for her living on the poverty line.
In a piece at Ravishly, “Life At The Intersections: Class, Shame, And Queer Parenting,” Katherine DM Clover (who also blogs at Post Nuclear Era), tells us about starting a family while living at the poverty line, and observes:
There is this idea that gay people, because we have to plan out how we want to have children instead of having them by accident, can plan to have them when we are perfectly ready. . . . A proper lesbian mom, it seems, should be career-focused and driven. When she gets around to having children, she will have plenty of money to pay for any necessary fertility treatments.
When things don’t work out that way, however, it raises the question:
Who’s allowed to have kids, though? . . . When we vilify poor and working-class parents for “irresponsibly” having children, we are setting the bar of parenthood out of reach for many.
Speaking of that career-driven lesbian mom, the Washington Post ran a piece last week with a headline asking, “why lesbians get paid more than straight women.” It cited a meta-analysis from the University of Washington that reviewed 29 other studies on wages and sexual orientation the Western Hemisphere and found “a 9 percent earnings premium for lesbians over heterosexual women.” (Gay men faced an 11 percent penalty.) The analysis attributed this to lesbians having more education and work experience. Another study found that “lesbians who had previously lived with male partners made 20 percent less than those who’d never cohabitated with a husband figure.” WaPo explores several reasons this is so, mostly around traditional gender expectations and disparities.
What almost gets lost in the WaPo article, however, is the parenthetical line, “(Still, two-women households, on average, see lower combined income than man-woman arrangements.)”
Let’s review. Fifteen percent of female same-sex couples raising children are in poverty, versus nine percent of married opposite-sex couples with children, according to a 2013 report from UCLA’s Williams Institute. Children aside, almost 30 percent of bisexual women and 23 percent of lesbian women live in poverty versus 21 percent of straight women, according to a 2015 report from he Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress. Transgender women are nearly four times as likely than the general population to have yearly incomes of $10,000 or less. LGBT women of color, older LGBT women and LGBT women raising children are particularly vulnerable.
In another essay just published today, “Dancing On The Poverty Line: It Was Never Supposed To Be Like This,” Clover writes about what this is like day to day, where she and her wife never have a day off in common all week, and she calculates to the penny the cost of dried beans versus canned, and diapers at the big-box store that requires finding a ride versus the more expensive store around the corner.
Yet Clover notes in her first piece that she has sought in vain to find camaraderie in other queer parenting blogs, with their talk of expensive preschools and setting aside money for IVF.
It’s true. Generally speaking, we folks in the queer parenting blogosphere seem a reasonably well-off lot. Not necessarily wealthy, but not in a financially fragile situation, either. Many paths to parenthood for queer people are expensive or presuppose a job with sufficient benefits to assuage the costs of fertility procedures, surrogacy, or adoption. And blogging takes electronics and the time to write. (Clover tells us she writes on a borrowed laptop and is “constantly trying to find a little bit of time to churn out a little bit more work.”)
We all need to remember, however, that not everyone’s experience matches our own. Let’s make an effort, then, to recognize if we are in a financially privileged position in relation to others. Especially when offering parenting advice, we should make room for solutions that don’t assume an identical financial situation. That’s not to say we shouldn’t share our stories if they involve pricey rounds of IVF or hefty adoption expenses. We just have to recognize that they are our own stories, and not necessarily universal. I probably haven’t been perfect on this score myself, but Clover’s piece tells me why I need to keep trying.
Thanks to Clover for sharing her experience as a queer parent with little money—but also for reminding us of those things about parenting that money can’t buy.