As my interfaith family heads towards Passover and Easter, holidays of hope, renewal, and freedom, I’m thinking about recent wins that LGBTQ families have had despite a climate of rising anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and action.
Here are a few of the things giving me hope right now.
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) signed legislation at the end of March to establish confirmatory adoptions, a streamlined process to confirm legal parentage ties between a nongestational parent (regardless of marital status) and their child created via assisted reproduction. The bill does away with burdensome background checks and the requirement to notify donors. It also states that consent to assisted reproduction, which is required for legal parentage, may be written or oral and given before, on, or after the day of birth. Finally, the bill allows for recognition of more than two parents.
Also going into effect this year (although passed last year) are the Massachusetts Parentage Act (MPA) and the Michigan Family Protection Act (MFPA). The MPA, which went into effect on January 1, updates state parentage laws to clarify and expand the many paths to parentage and better protect the children of LGBTQ parents, those formed via assisted reproduction, and those with de facto or functional parents. It also expands access to Voluntary Acknowledgments of Parentage (VAPs), simple, free forms that can be completed at the hospital immediately after a birth to establish legal parentage. Massachusetts had been the only New England state that had not comprehensively reformed its parentage laws to account for the diversity of family forms today—although it has one of the highest rates of births through assisted reproduction in the nation, and was the first in the nation to allow same-sex couples to marry.
The MFPA, which went into effect on April 1, similarly ensures that children born to LGBTQ parents and via assisted reproduction have clear paths to parentage that can be established from the moment of birth, including via a simple, free acknowledgment of parentage form. Additionally, Michigan had been the only state that criminalized contractional surrogacy, and the MFPA both decriminalizes it and provides clear protections for everyone involved. I’m particularly heartened by the broad coalition of both LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ family advocates who came together to support this bills, as I detailed here.
Even under the pall of the current federal administration, some state legislatures are still acting for justice. The Montana legislature on April 8 defeated a bill that would have classified medical care for transgender youth as a felony, targeting not only medical professionals but also parents, including those simply visiting Montana from another state, if they brought along gender-affirming medication for their trans child, per the reporting of journalist Erin Reed. The bill was defeated, however, after State Representative SJ Howell (D-Missoula), who is nonbinary, spoke on the floor, explaining that the bill was overly broad and not the right tool to regulate medical care. They also noted that the bill raises issues of “parental rights,” because “there are a lot of parents of trans kids that are just doing what they believe is best for their kids.” That was a neat flip of “parental rights” rhetoric often used by conservatives to justify banning LGBTQ-inclusive materials from schools and libraries and engaging in other anti-LGBTQ practices. In the end, 17 Republicans joined Democrats to defeat the bill.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court also issued a major ruling in support of LGBTQ families in March, when it said that a nongenetic, nongestational lesbian mother is a legal parent to the child she and her former spouse had planned for and conceived through assisted reproduction. The ruling also asserts the principle of intent-based parentage, recognizing an intended parent as a legal parent, regardless of marital status, if they consent to the conception of a child born using assisted reproduction.
And two federal courts have blocked the president’s attempt to ban transgender people from the military—an attempt that would have repercussions on both individuals and families, as I’ve explained. Judge Ana Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Biden appointee, was scathing in her ruling (PDF) for a nationwide preliminary injunction, saying, “The Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.” Judge Benjamin Hale Settle of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, a George W. Bush appointee, stated in a second nationwide preliminary injunction (PDF), “The government’s arguments are not persuasive, and it is not an especially close question on this record…. Any evidence that such service over the past four years harmed any of the military’s inarguably critical aims would be front and center. But there is none.”
At our current moment in history, new tyrants loom large. New plagues, real and metaphorical, threaten us. I don’t need to list them all for you here. But in this season, let us remember that we also have family (in the widest sense), friends, and community. We have allies working with us. And LGBTQ people are continuing to start or expand our families and to raise children with values of love and resilience. There is hope, if we look for it.
Wishing you all the best of this season, no matter how or whether you observe its holidays.