If you feel it’s your day, then celebrate! Whether you call yourself Mom, Mama, Mommy, Maman, Mamá, Mami, Momo, Momily, MaPa, Baba, Maddy, or any other parenting name, if you want to rejoice in your parental identity today (more so than any other day), go for it! Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can seem to underscore that LGBTQ families are different—but I say that’s all the more reason to reclaim the holidays as our own.
“Some L.G.B.T. Parents Reject the Names ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy,'” says the headline in today’s New York Times. That’s no surprise to readers here—but it means it’s time once again to highlight the spreadsheet of names I’ve been collecting since 2011 on this very topic. Check out people’s names and name stories and add yours!
Today is International Women’s Day, “a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.” We do that year round at our house of two moms—but the day has gotten me thinking about how I first learned about the need for gender equity.
Today marks the 19th International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice. Even as our thoughts today turn to the transgender community, their parents, children, and friends, may they also turn towards what we can do to help end the violence.
Here’s something to brighten your day as you prep your children’s costumes (and your own?) and get the candy bowl ready—a two-minute Halloween video that challenges assumptions about gender.
Halloween is almost here, which for many of us means trips to the store to purchase overpriced costumes or hours spent sewing and hot-gluing homemade versions, both for our kids and for ourselves. October is also, however, LGBTQ History Month and the month of National Coming Out Day, making Halloween’s topics of heroes and hidden identities relevant in multiple ways. Here are some things that Halloween offers to support and sustain our multifaceted queer selves.
Following right after yesterday’s anti-bullying Spirit Day is the synergistic National Know Your Classmates Day, an initiative aimed at ending social isolation, nurturing healthy relationships, and addressing fear of differences among middle school students. Over 850 schools across the country are taking part this year.
Our country feels very different than it did a year ago on the last National Coming Out Day, when the prospect of an LGBTQ-friendly president was still possible. Now, however, the day feels even more like a time for activism and resistance.
For LGBTQ History Month, let’s take a quick tour of LGBTQ parenting history in the U.S. to remind us that our “modern families” really have older roots.
It’s LGBTQ History Month, so I’m going to celebrate with a series of posts linking to historical stories, including primary sources, that help illuminate the history of LGBTQ parents and our children.
