Here’s what’s happening that I haven’t covered in depth elsewhere. Pull up a cup of coffee, tea, or other beverage and read on!
Family Profiles
- Attorney Joyce Kauffman, a member of the LGBT Family Law Institute, writes at the LGBT Bar about her personal path to parenthood in the 1990s, her work on the landmark case that established the right of same-sex couples to adopt children in Massachusetts, and establishing three people as the legal parents of her daughter to reflect the reality of their family.
- Jen Colletta, my former editor at Philadelphia Gay News, writes for the paper about the birth of her child and her spouse’s emergency C-section (which brought me flashbacks to my own spouse’s emergency C after an induced labor). Despite the unexpected, Colletta writes, ” I would guess that this is an experience that transcends sexual orientation, gender identity, race, age and so many other barriers; the first time you see your child — no matter how they’re conceived or brought into this world — is, as clichéd as it may sound, life-changing.”
- High school student and Girl Scout Jean Azar-Tanguay, who has two dads, is profiled in Medium’s series “The Edge of Adulthood: Forty-Six American Teens Discuss Their Lives, Their Struggles, and What’s Next.“
- Lotte Jeffs tells Grazia about her and her wife Jen’s path to parenthood in the U.K., near London, from pre-birth classes to baby clinics and finding community. It’s a lovely piece, but I have to offer a note to the editors (and editors generally): Please stop creating headlines like “What It Feels Like To Be Same Sex Parents.” There’s no one way that it feels like. We are as diverse as parents generally, and it does no one any good to compress us all into a single story.
- PinkNews profiles George and Martin Lusty, a U.K. couple who adopted two children from foster care, and shares some statistics about adoption by LGBT+ people in the U.K.
- BBC show DIY SOS helped out two dads and their four children, three with special needs, by building a new home for the family. If you’re in the U.K., you can watch the episode here; otherwise, you can view a clip on Facebook.
Politics and Law
- A federal judge ruled September 14 that the ACLU can move forward with its lawsuit challenging Michigan’s practice of allowing discrimination against same-sex couples in the public foster care system. Michigan is one of 10 states that allows state-contracted, taxpayer-funded foster care and adoption agencies to cite religious objections as a reason for rejecting same-sex couples as prospective adoptive families. The plaintiffs, Kristy and Dana Dumont and Erin and Rebecca Busk-Sutton, sought to adopt children in the foster care system, but were turned away by two state-contracted agencies because they are same-sex couples.
- Ireland is about to implement measures so that same-sex couples will be able to put both of their names on their children’s birth certificates, reports Independent.ie. Additional measures will ban anonymous donations of gametes and allow donor-conceived children to request information about their genetic parentage when they turn 18.
- The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against a woman, C.G., who sought partial custody of a child born in 2006 to her former same-sex partner, J.H., and said she could not be a legal parent, reports PennLive. The two never married or did a second-parent adoption. (Neither was legal at the time in Florida, where they were living when the child was born.) Witnesses differed in their testimony as to whether C.G. had consented to be a parent, according to court records. I don’t know enough about Pennsylvania state law to know whether the justice ruled appropriately, nor enough about the women to know whether C.G. did or did not “assume a parental status or discharge parental duties”—but I will say that this is exactly the kind of situation that legislation such as California’s new parentage law is designed to avoid.
- Anti-LGBTQ groups have launched a campaign, keepkidsfirst.com, promoting the idea that adoption and foster care agencies should be able to receive tax dollars and still discriminate against LGBTQ parents, LGBTQ youth, and others under the guise of religious beliefs, reports Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters. They claim that to do otherwise will limit the number of children able to find homes. That’s a specious argument, as I’ve written here and here, and as Zack Ford recently showed at ThinkProgress.
Health
- The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a new policy statement on the support of transgender and gender-diverse youth, in which they “review relevant concepts and challenges and provide suggestions for pediatric providers that are focused on promoting the health and positive development of youth that identify as TGD while eliminating discrimination and stigma.”
Entertainment
- PFLAG has a nice piece on Head Over Heels, a new Broadway musical about “a king about to lose his throne, a queen about to lose her inhibitions, and two princesses about to find love.” Also starring, as the non-binary oracle Pythio, is drag queen and trans-activist Peppermint, runner-up on the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.