LGBTQ Parenting Roundup: Pride Edition

Let’s get Pride rolling with a roundup of some news and stories about LGBTQ parents that I haven’t covered separately, including family profiles, political news and insights, new family building resources, and some simply cool things. Have a read, then go spread some rainbows!

Family Profiles and News

• Rosa Rankin-Gee writes at the Guardian about her and her spouse’s path to parenthood via reciprocal IVF, using her egg and her spouse’s womb. It’s the same method my own spouse and I used back in the early aughts and which has a history going back to the mid-1990s, but it is a more complicated way of doing things and not for everyone. I’m glad to see others sharing their experiences with it, too.
• Musician Linda Perry and actor Sara Gilbert, ex-spouses and current co-parents, spoke with GLAAD about parenting, co-parenting, and collaborating on a new music video for Perry’s hit song “Beautiful,” starring their child Rhodes. Read their interview and watch the video on GLAAD’s website.
• Niecy Nash-Betts spoke with Marie-Claire about parenting her three grown children, being a working mom in Hollywood, portraying motherhood as an actor, wanting to see more masculine-identified queer women in parenting roles on screen, and how coming out and marrying Jessica Betts affected her relationship with her kids. (Spoiler: it brought them closer.) As the parent of a grown son myself, I appreciated this wisdom from another queer mom whose kids are grown but whose relationship with them is vibrant and strong.
• This American Life just did an episode featuring Geirid, a transgender lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, and her spouse Chrissy. Their son has a medical condition that would cost more than $500,000 a year to treat without insurance, which the military’s health coverage had provided—but then the president signed an executive order banning trans people from the military, and they had to use all their resourcefulness to decide what to do.
• Jameel Mayers of Fathernetics writes about “The Real Reason Pride Matters for Gay Dads and Their Families.” Much of what he says could apply to families with LGBTQ parents of other genders, too.
• Broadway World profiles Christopher and Clay Rice-Thomson, who met in 2011 while (successfully) auditioning for the Broadway national tour of West Side Story, married in 2019, and are now the fathers of 1-year-old twins.

Family Announcements

• Actor Beanie Feldstein and her spouse, producer Bonnie-Chance Roberts, have announced that they are expecting a baby.
• Actor Rebel Wilson and her spouse, designer Ramona Agruma, have announced the birth of their second child.

Politics and Law

• “Gay men have equal parenting rights in Canada — but not equal access to parenthood” writes sociologist S. W. Underwood at The Conversation. They explain that to start their families, gay men often go through “highly bureaucratized processes” that are often emotionally and financially challenging, and suggest ways that policymakers could reduce some of those barriers.
• “When politicians debate families like mine, our kids are suffering,” asserts Bethany Snyder, a queer mom partnered with a transgender dad, at the Advocate.
• “A right does not need to be banned to be restricted. Sometimes it only needs to be made uncertain,” begins Ignacio Estrada Cepero’s thoughtful piece in the Los Angeles Blade, which explains that adoption access for same-sex couples in Italy and the United States “is shaped not only by law, but by geography, institutions, and applied standards.”
• “Many things are bad for children, but having gay parents still isn’t one of them,” states the headline of Maibritt Henkel’s article at The Argument. While most readers here will not need convincing of that fact, the piece is actually a good look at the resurgent campaign to end marriage equality, which puts the welfare of children at the center of its (supposed) argument.
• The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that the nongestational mother in a former couple who had three children together via assisted reproduction before they could legally marry has no rights to the children. An appeals court had said that if the couple would have been married when the children were conceived, if it wasn’t for the state’s ban on same-sex couples marrying, then the nongestational mother should be recognized as a parent—but the gestational mother took the case to the state Supreme Court, which disagreed. As I wrote when I first covered the case, the situation points to the broader, imperative need for states to update and clarify their parentage laws so they protect children in all of the wide variety of families today.
• Bree Fram, a former colonel in the U.S. Space Force who was forced out for being transgender, suspended her campaign for Congress in Virginia’s 11th District, citing the Virginia Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the state’s new voter-approved congressional map, which left her campaign without enough time to run a meaningful campaign in the previous district. Fram and her wife of 20 years have two children.

Family Building Resources

• GWK Academy Founder Brian Rosenberg and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Joey Guzman-Kuffel write at LGBTQ Nation about “The emotional weight nobody warns you about: mental health and LGBTQ+ family building.” They say, “Every hopeful parent faces emotional challenges on the road to parenthood. But LGBTQ+ people often carry additional layers,” and offer suggestions for coping with this and places to find support.
• Tickets are now on sale for Together: A Queer Family Building Conference, hosted by PregnantTogether November 9-10, 2026. The two-day virtual conference is created by and for queer parents, queer parents-to-be, and the professionals who support them. Get a free public pass to access a couple of the sessions, or step up to paid passes for more, including ones that offer CEUs for physicians, social workers, psychologists, nurses, and other professionals.
• OutCare Health and GWK Academy have launched the LGBTQ+ Affirming Fertility Care Certification, “a comprehensive certification for all professionals involved in family-building pathways.”
• Family Equality has launched the resource guide “Identifying Affirming Adoption and Foster Care Agencies: A Guide for Prospective LGBTQ+ Parents,” in collaboration with the National LGBTQ Task Force and Unicorn Solutions.

Cool Things

• Roxie Alsruhe, a queer mom of two, was frustrated trying to track how fresh her wife’s expressed breast milk was when they were feeding their first child, reports LGBTQ Nation. Breast milk expires within hours and must then be thrown out. Alsruhe therefore invented a special ring that fits over any bottle and contains an RFID chip which connects to an app and alerts parents when a bottle is about to expire. Innovation!
• Paralympian Tatyana McFadden, the most-decorated U.S. track and field athlete in either the Paralympics or Olympics, and who was raised by two moms, broke her own world records in both the 400m and 800m races at the Daniela Jutzeler Memorial in Switzerland.