The L Word: Generation Q gave us plenty of queer parenting content this week as Angie met her donor sibling and Gigi and Bette debated the experiences of being a nonbiological mom. Let’s recap—and I’ll share some real-life resources about donor siblings and nonbio moms!
Spoilers ahead.
Finding the Words
As we knew from the first episode of the season, Bette and Tina’s 17-year-old daughter Angie wants to meet her sperm donor, although her parents want her to wait until she’s 18. Unbeknownst to them, she took a DNA test. As this episode opens, we see her rushing to her computer to find the results—and surprise (or not really)! There’s a match to a close relative, a Kayla Allenwood, who has sent Angie a message. Long-time viewers will remember that Tina and Bette’s donor was one Marcus Allenwood.
Angie is clearly excited and runs (in her very cool sneakers) to tell her girlfriend Jordi about Kayla, who is 15 years old and lives nearby. When Jordi learns that Angie hasn’t told her moms yet, she says she’ll go with Angie to meet her in case Kayla isn’t who she says she is.
A few scenes later, however, Angie tells Bette about the DNA test. It’s unclear why Angie spilled the beans now. I’d like to think it’s that Angie is basically a good kid and realizes that the danger Jordi mentioned could be real.
Bette, however, is not amused that Angie took the test. The conversation goes like this:
Angie: “But I have a half sister.”
Bette: “You don’t have a sister.”
Angie: “And….”
Bette: “You don’t have a sister.”
Angie: “I do.”
Bette: “No, you don’t.”
What we have here is partly a failure of terminology. Angie agrees with Bette that her donor is not her father. Bette also reasonably thinks that any daughter of the donor would not be Angie’s sister. Since Bette and Tina have not wanted Angie to have contact with her donor, however, I’m guessing they probably haven’t used terms like “donor sibling” with Angie. Without that term to define her relationship with Kayla, Angie therefore uses one she knows: “half sister,” even if she understands the difference between a donor and a father, and thus presumably the difference between a sister one grew up with and someone who is simply the genetic child of at least one of the same parents. Bette, for her part, should realize Angie knows this. She comes off sounding defensive (about which more in a moment).
Angie then tells Bette that she and Kayla made plans to meet. Bette is furious, concerned for Angie’s safety, since they don’t really know who Kayla is. Angie leaves.
A Threat?
Exit Angie and enter Gigi, who has been dating Bette. Bette explains what Angie did. Gigi, trying to be helpful, tells Bette that she and her ex, Nat, are “open with the kids about their donor.”
Bette insists her situation is different because she and Tina used a known donor, not a sperm bank like Gigi and Nat. “He was an artist that we knew, and we promised him that he would be able to stay anonymous,” she explains.
Gigi then wonders if Bette’s reluctance is because Bette is a nonbiological mother and the donor threatens Bette’s role as a parent. That was Gigi’s experience as a nonbiological mother, she says. “Maybe you feel like, I don’t know, it diminishes your role as a mom,” she suggests.
Bette insists it’s not. Gigi admits, “I just get scared sometimes that my kids aren’t really mine. But of course they’re mine. It’s just threatening.”
“Well, that’s not it. I don’t feel threatened,” Bette reiterates. Perhaps she doth protest too much—or perhaps she really is just trying to protect their agreement with the donor.
Either way, I love that Gigi voices her experience here, which is definitely what some real nonbio moms have felt. For real-life stories from the perspectives of nonbiological parents, try the recent What’s in a Name? Perspectives from Non-Biological and Non-Gestational Queer Mothers, edited by Sherri Martin-Baron, Raechel Johns, and Emily Regan Wills (2020), the slightly older Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All, edited by Harlyn Aizley (2006), or some of these memoirs.
Reaching Out
Angie calls from the next room to ask Bette who’s there, and Bette says, “No one.” Gigi takes offense at being “no one,” and leaves, though Bette insists it was just not a good time to meet Angie. Introducing one’s kids to someone one is dating is always tricky. Personally, I think Gigi was oversensitive, but the rest of the episode hints that Gigi and Bette’s relationship may not last, so perhaps Bette was channeling some of that uncertainty.
Bette leaves a message on Tina’s phone, asking her to call as soon as possible. I wish Tina had actually been in the episode, since she’s the other main person with a stake here, but actor Laurel Holloman seems mostly focused on her career as a painter now. We can’t have everything.
Bette then gives in. It feels somewhat out of character, a rushed plot point, but maybe the point is that Angie is Alpha Bette’s soft spot, as our kids are to so many of us. She agrees to take Angie “to meet your half sister.”
Angie knows who her family is.
Fast forward to Bette, Shane, and Alice taking Angie to the meeting at a coffee shop. The adults are hovering, but Angie wants a little space. She goes in alone while they watch through the plate glass window. Kayla (show newcomer Brook’Lynn Sanders) indeed appears to be a 15-year-old girl and no threat. Angie sees Bette, Shane, and Alice waving from outside, and tells Kayla, “That’s my family.” This is a great line, reminding us that family can be both genetic and chosen. (You may recall that Angie once referred to “Uncle Shane.”) Outside, Shane similarly assures Bette, “Angie knows who her family is.”
That, dear readers, is the main point. Research on real parents and their donor-conceived children confirms that relationships among donor siblings can be valuable, but doesn’t take the place of the family in which one was raised. We shouldn’t see a hard split between a genetics-based view of family and a choice-based one, though. Things are more wonderfully complicated than that. In Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin, by Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson (2019), the authors found that the kids themselves in two-mom families sometimes felt that by meeting their donor siblings, “they were betraying their non-genetic mom—or both their moms and the way they created the family” (even though the meeting was often the moms’ idea)—but over time, “the stress on genetic ties recedes, to be replaced by an emphasis on the choice that the participation in these groups—and the dynamic affiliations that form within them—actually represents.”
In other words, as Hertz explained in an interview with me, developing relationships with donor kin is “a form of choice family.” One is choosing to connect with them in person. Unlike other forms of “chosen families,” however, “It is different in this case because people are connecting with their biological relatives.”
Notably, too, the children in their study found multiple benefits in meeting donor siblings. “It helped them understand idiosyncratic things about themselves that they didn’t find within their own families,” Hertz said. Most of the children, even in populous urban areas, did not know any other donor-conceived children. In meeting their donor siblings, therefore, “Many of them felt this was the first group they could really talk to about being donor-conceived and about their unique donor.” As Angie said in the first episode of the season, “I still want to know more about who I am.”
Even when there wasn’t a strong sense they were going to continue the relationships with their donor siblings, the children in the study indicated “maybe they would draw on them in the future.” Connecting with donor kin “means that you’re acknowledging that there’s something beyond the nuclear family that exists out there,” Hertz noted, and added, “It does take what was a market transaction [buying sperm] and makes it something that is incredibly intimate. That’s been a positive that everyone I’ve interviewed talks about.”
In addition to Random Families, which I highly recommend, other LGBTQ-inclusive books on donor families include Finding Our Families: A First-of-Its-Kind Book for Donor-Conceived People and Their Families, by Wendy Kramer and Naomi Cahn (2013) and the somewhat older Mommies, Daddies, Donors, Surrogates: Answering Tough Questions and Building Strong Families, by Diane Ehrensaft (2005). There aren’t a lot of books for young children that discuss donor siblings, but here are a few.
I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop the relationship between Kayla and Angie going forward. Stay tuned!
Bonus fun fact: This episode’s title was, “Luck Be a Lady.” In the original L Word series, the episode of that same name (Season 4, Episode 6) involved Bette and Tina arguing over Angie’s preschool placement, with Bette claiming that it could impact Angie’s ability to get into an Ivy League school. Angie is 17 now, and presumably a junior in high school, which means she should be starting to explore colleges (Ivy or otherwise) or career options soon. Stay tuned to see how that might evolve. (Having just gone through this with my own son, I may have opinions on how Bette, Tina, and Angie handle it….)