Summer may sometimes feel like a slow time of year, but there’s still a lot happening in LGBTQ parenting news!
Family Profiles
- Them is running a multi-part series entitled “Birth Story,” profiling a variety of LGBTQ parents.
- The Chicago Tribune profiles transgender couple Myles and Precious Brady Davis, who are expecting their first child.
- HuffPo Life profiles Dese’Rae Stage and Felicidad Garcia, who started fertility treatments at the same time and then experienced a pregnancy loss right after one of them gave birth, but found the emotional and financial wherewithal to try for another pregnancy.
- Newsweek profiles Ash Summers, who identifies as lesbian and recently wrote at Reddit about her two lesbian grandmothers, who have been together 42 years. (But really, Newsweek, we could have done without the line, “while Summers isn’t genetically related to Gay [one of the grandmothers], she considers both women her grandmothers.” Feels like they’re saying, “They’re a family even though—gasp—they’re not genetically related”—when there are enough examples of families created through adoption and donor gametes that this shouldn’t be something we need to note anymore.
- A pair of male penguins at the Berlin Zoo have been given an egg to hatch, although no one knows yet whether it is fertilized. If it is, they could soon join the many other same-sex penguin parents around the world.
Politics and Law
- A new law proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron’s government would allow single women and same-sex couples to use reproductive technologies such as assisted insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF). Currently, only infertile different-sex couples are eligible for those procedures. The bill would also allow children conceived via donor insemination to find out the donor’s identity when they reach age 18. It would not remove the country’s ban on surrogacy, however.
- A two-dad couple from Russia has fled the country with their two children after state officials learned that social workers had placed the children with them to raise, violating the state’s ban on “gay propaganda.” The state also brought criminal charges against the social workers who placed them.
- RTE shares the stories of two two-mom couples in Ireland in the wake of delay in a law that would recognize both moms in a couple as legal parents.
- The Utah Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex couples, like different-sex ones, must be allowed to have children through surrogacy.
- North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper issued an executive order to ban conversion therapy for minors by any health care provider receiving state or federal funds.
- Kansas Governor Laura Kelly has issued draft guidelines to foster care agencies, recommending that “LGBTQ youth should be placed in homes that respect their identities” and that foster homes should offer training to help parents encourage LGBTQ youth “to express themselves as they see themselves.” Conservatives are saying the move is intended to get around a law passed under the previous administration, which allows child service agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ and other prospective parents or youth in care. They’re not wrong; Kelly has said she will try to avoid enforcing the discriminatory law.
- That leads us to “The Latest Victims of Trump’s Cruelty? Foster Children,” by Jennifer Finney Boylan in the New York Times, explaining how the administration is planning to allow discrimination against prospective foster parents and why we need the Every Child Deserves a Family Act. (Here’s my own take on the subject.)
- Julianna S. Gonen of the National Center for Lesbian Rights writes at Alliance for Justice on “Our Common Quest for Autonomy and Dignity: Reproductive Rights and LGBTQ Equality.” (I have a few opinions on this myself.)
Schools and Law
- The U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled in favor of transgender man Gavin Grimm, in his long-running sex discrimination lawsuit against the Gloucester County School Board. Grimm’s case began when he was in high school and the school board adopted a policy preventing him from using bathroom facilities consistent with his gender identity. The case could yet be appealed, but this is nevertheless a significant ruling in Grimm’s favor.
- Illinois becomes the fourth state (after California, New Jersey, and Colorado) to pass legislation requiring that public school curricula include lessons about the contributions of LGBTQ people. (A similar bill in Vermont seems stuck in committee.)
Research
- A study by Rachel Farr, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, found no differences among adoptive families with lesbian or gay parents versus different-sex parents in how the families resolved conflict or in child outcomes. Rather, “children’s positive outcomes were linked with more positive family behaviors.” The study was a longitudinal follow-up of nearly 100 adoptive families with school-age children as they matured from early to middle childhood. Farr sought “to learn how not only behavioral outcomes, but also how outcomes specifically related to adoption, might connect with family conflict behaviors.”
Sports
- U.S. Women’s National Team soccer coach Jill Ellis is stepping down after leading the team to two Women’s World Cup titles. “She said several elements led to her decision, most importantly the opportunity to make her daughter a priority as she enters high school,” she told ESPN. Ellis and spouse Betsy Stephenson have a 14-year-old daughter.
Inclusive Books (and Allies)
- Angela Anagnost-Repke, a self-described “cisgender, heterosexual woman,” writes at PopSugar about making sure her own young children hear LGBTQ-inclusive stories and helping their elementary school library improve their collection of LGBTQ-inclusive books. A great example of allyship! (Looking for such titles yourself? Here are my annotated lists.)
- Gayle Pitman, author of This Day in June
, The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets
, and many other children’s and young adult books on LGBTQ history and identity, has a guest post at Teaching Books on why she writes about LGBTQ history.
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