Personal Stories
- Some of you may know Brett Berk, aka The Gay Uncle, from his blog, his book, The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting
, his pieces at Momlogic, or even Stick Shift, his Vanity Fair gay car blog. The guy gets around. Seems like he’s not the only one in his family to be in the media, however. The New York Times yesterday ran a piece on Brett’s mom’s partner, Terri White, her rags-to-riches story as a Broadway star, and her upcoming marriage to Donna Barnett, Brett’s mom. Yes, sometimes LGBT people have LGBT kids. Pure statistics, despite what the ultra-right might think. (And if you haven’t read Brett’s very funny piece about his mom trying to “outgay” him, go do so.)
- The U.K.’s Guardian has a long piece on “The Rise of the Gay Dad,” which, despite sounding like a Transformers sequel made by the aforementioned Mr. Berk, is really a nice set of profiles of several gay dads.
Schools
- The Human Rights Campaign Foundation released three new lesson plans “that will help educators to engage their college, high school, and middle school students in discussing gender identity and how gender identity discrimination affects people in education, employment, and family law.”
- In Maine’s Kennebec Journal, local mother Nancy Greenier hits the target in response to the conservative ad portraying a mother horrified that her second-grader is learning that some kids have same-sex parents. Greenier writes, “The most influential and effective teaching is done in the home, not in the school. What a perfect opportunity for this mother to teach her second-grader that all of these parents are of equal value, and therefore they all share the right to live freely and legally under the same laws.”
Science?
- Not LGBT specific, but of interest to many of us: Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that the proportion of in vitro fertilization (IVF) multiple births was lower in the eight states that provide insurance coverage for couples seeking IVF treatment. When couples pay for IVF themselves, physicians may feel pressure to transfer more embryos per cycle in order to up the odds that at least one will flourish.
- I’m not even sure where to begin unpacking this one. The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph writes about a new report from the Danish government on the effects on children of chemical contamination from everyday items:
A picture is emerging of ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminising male children all over the developed world. . . . Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery of the “lost boys”: babies who should normally be male who have been born as girls instead. . . . Young boys, like those in the Danish study, could end up producing less sperm and developing feminised behaviour. Research at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes.
Seems like science skewed by a conservative lens, if you ask me. Yes, the chemicals may not be good for our kids, but this seems like scare tactics about the horrors of “feminised” boys and men. (See also the video (no longer on YouTube) in which Falcon Heene, aka “The Balloon Boy,” and his siblings sing about the dangers of “pussification.”)
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