LGBTQ families have long been the subject of policy debates—but the voices of youth and adults with LGBTQ parents have not always been heard. COLAGE, the national organization dedicated to uniting and supporting people with LGBTQ parents, is ramping up its efforts to change that.
In January, COLAGE hired Chief Legal and Policy Officer Meg York, its first full-time policy attorney. York, whose background is in family law, came to COLAGE after working as chief counsel at Family Equality, and is raising three children with her wife. “COLAGE brings something unique to policy spaces,” she said in an interview. “The idea of centering people with LGBTQ parents shifts the entire conversation.”
Anti-LGBTQ groups, she said, “are claiming that the kids aren’t all right when the kids are, very clearly, all right.” COLAGE’s policy work seeks “to put that lived experience in front of lawmakers.” And it is COLAGErs—the organization’s general term for anyone with one or more LGBTQ parents—who are leading the way. “Our policy work with COLAGE comes from the COLAGErs themselves,” York said. “It’s not somebody else’s ideas about what’s best for people, but it’s really their lived reality, transformed into law and policy.”
COLAGE, founded in 1990, is not new to the policy arena. Most notably, it partnered with Family Equality, whose focus is on supporting LGBTQ parents, to compile COLAGErs’ experiences for a “Voices of Children” brief in both the Windsor (2013) and Obergefell (2015) U.S. Supreme Court marriage equality cases. It is impossible not to hear echoes of the brief in the rulings, which emphasized the positive impact of marriage equality on children.
Now, however, COLAGE is energizing its policy work through what it calls the “Queerspawn Agenda.” The agenda has three main pillars: parentage reform; safe, accessible, and transparent family formation; and safe schools for children in LGBTQ+ families.
In the parentage arena, York said, “Our goal is to update parentage law across the country so that there are comprehensive protections for kids with LGBTQ parents.” She explained, “Parentage is really the legal foundation of family security, particularly for kids with LGBTQ parents, and particularly if they’re born through assisted reproduction.” This security “is critical to children’s well-being and affords children access to a whole host of benefits.”
Only about 15 states have comprehensive, modernized parentage legislation, however. Most often, this has been based upon the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act (UPA 2017), a model law developed by the bipartisan Uniform Laws Commission. Among other things, UPA 2017 creates clear and equitable paths to legal parentage not only for LGBTQ families but also others formed via assisted reproduction, including surrogacy. “What’s good for LGBTQ families is good for all families,” York affirmed.
COLAGE has actively worked on parentage laws in several states, most recently in Delaware, whose legislature passed a UPA 2017-based parentage reform bill on May 5. There and elsewhere, COLAGE members shared personal testimony with legislators about how outdated laws harmed their families.
On the family formation front, York said, COLAGE seeks to uphold “the ability to access the ways people form families,” including by donor conception. It also wants to make sure “that donor conceived individuals have the protections and supports that they need,” such as “access to [donor] information that they may or may not choose to seek out.”
Much of COLAGE’s work is in collaboration with other LGBTQ, family building, and reproductive rights organizations, which each “bring slightly different perspectives into the room,” she said. COLAGE has been involved, for example, in conversations around legislative proposals to regulate donor conception. “Many of these efforts are driven by late-discovery donor-conceived individuals whose parents were not forthcoming about how they were conceived,” York added, noting that that is typically not the case for COLAGErs. And no legislation can require parents to be truthful to their children about being donor conceived, she said. Nevertheless, even some donor-conceived COLAGErs “would also like to see increased regulation and access to certain information from their donors.”
At the same time, York cautioned, “We have to be careful that in attempting to address issues identified by some members of the DCP [donor conceived people] community, that we’re not exacerbating risks or harms for COLAGErs or LGBTQ+ family building.” She explained, “Some of these efforts could risk negatively impacting family formation options, shoring up biogenetic essentialism, increasing stigma for children who don’t share genetics with a parent, and possibly undermining the security of families formed through assisted reproduction,” particularly in states without updated parentage laws. “This area of law and regulation requires careful consideration and a balancing of interests because it touches so much more than the [donor conception] industry,” she said. COLAGE’s job, therefore, is “to bring folks together, talk about the different perspectives, and then advocate in a way that addresses as many of the needs and desires as possible.”
Finally, COLAGE is also working to combat “Don’t Say Gay/Trans’’ legislation and other anti-LGBTQ laws and policies related to schools. “Oftentimes when we talk about kids in school, the focus tends to be on LGBTQ youth,” York observed. She wants a broader approach; kids with LGBTQ parents are, she said, “a forgotten demographic in the advocacy space. COLAGE is trying to work to make sure that those spaces are welcoming and supportive to COLAGErs as well.”
In all three areas of the Queerspawn Agenda, “People who grew up in families like ours are telling lawmakers exactly what works and what doesn’t. And that’s a voice that really needs to be heard,” York asserted. “Our hope is to use COLAGEr voices to shift the narrative and improve the law for all families.”
(Originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.)