Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was kept from his children for a day last week by a false allegation of child abuse. The incident has outraged people of all identities—but for LGBTQ parents and parents with LGBTQ children, it may touch longstanding fears. Here’s some background and some hope.
The Buttigieg Family’s Ordeal
Buttigieg wrote on his Substack about the hoax call to Michigan Child Protective Services (CPS), which led to a police officer and a CPS worker showing up on his doorstep. He was then kept away from his 4-year-old twins for 24 hours while they were subject to hour-long interviews with strangers (although they were at least allowed to stay overnight with their grandparents).
He and his husband Chasten had little recourse in the moment, but had hired a lawyer by the next morning, when Buttigieg was interviewed by a police officer and a CPS worker, and finally learned, “The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.” Buttigieg had never even been to the town where the woman purportedly met him. Both interviewers exonerated him, and the officer said he thought the incident was “politically motivated.”
As Buttigieg acknowledges, the officials were doing their jobs and following procedures designed to protect children who are actually in dangerous situations. And many states, including Michigan, allow anonymous tips of child abuse.
Clearly, however, there is something wrong when CPS can take action like this on an anonymous tip that claimed to be passing along information about something that the caller hadn’t even personally experienced, but had heard second-hand about supposed events several years old. Was there no way for them to have confirmed sooner that Buttigieg had never even been to the locale, before separating him from his children? The whole situation raises questions about the state’s procedures.
Buttigieg has been the target of hatred before. Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticized him for taking paternity leave and made jokes about Buttigieg learning how to breastfeed, as the Guardian has reported. Mike Pence also jibed about Buttigieg taking “maternity leave,” NBC News noted. Last week’s false allegation was an escalation, however, as it affected his children directly. As Buttigieg wrote:
They are four years old. Four. They do not know or care what a Democrat or a Republican is. They don’t know how politics works. They don’t know about hate. They should be worrying about what kind of ice cream they’re getting this afternoon, not why they are being brought into a meeting with a grownup asking strange questions or why their Papa is suddenly unavailable to read them a bedtime story. For God’s sake, they are just kids.
As of this writing, we don’t yet know the real motivation for the caller’s action. Buttigieg calls it “a cruel, politically motivated hoax that harmed our family.” The caller remains unknown, however, leaving open the question of whether the hoax was purely political, based on Buttigieg’s policy stances and/or political actions, or if there was anti-LGBTQ animus involved. Buttigieg is still one of the most visible LGBTQ parents in the media, making it possible—I would say likely—that the act was a combination of both. As Buttigieg himself acknowledged, “It’s not lost on me that this happened soon after we shared photos of our family on social media for Father’s Day. Or that this occurred during a month meant to make families like ours feel welcome and safe.”
I encourage you to go read Buttigieg’s piece in full; he explains more details of what happened, shares his feelings of rage and sadness, and sets out his path forward.
A History of Unwarranted Accusations
People of all identities are appalled by what happened to the family, judging from comments I have read online. But I have also seen some LGBTQ parents and parents of LGBTQ children expressing particular concern, based on the long history of anti-LGBTQ bias separating parents and children.
Starting in the 1960s, for example, many LGBTQ parents began to be more open about their identities and to leave heterosexual marriages. Courts would often find against them in custody hearings because of groundless fears that “being raised with lesbians and gay men harmed children in some way, socially, emotionally, psychologically, or sexually,” and that “gay men and lesbians were likely to molest their children,” as Daniel Winunwe Rivers explains in Radical Relations, his history of lesbian- and gay-headed families. Anti-sodomy laws were wielded agains queer parents of all genders in attempts to show their lack of fitness to be parents.
There were other situations when queer parents were forcibly separated from their children, too. In 1985, Massachusetts couple Don Babets and David Jean had their foster children removed from their care by the Department of Social Services (DSS) on the same day that the Boston Globe reported that some of their neighbors were opposed to the boys’ placement, as WBUR has related. Mere weeks later, the state instituted a new policy under which it was almost impossible for gay and lesbian people to become foster parents. (Babets and Jean sued, and although they never got the boys back, “in 1990 as a result of the case DSS returned to a ‘best interests of the child’ standard for foster care rather than focusing on the sexual orientation of the parents,” GLAD Law notes.)
In another headline case, the mother of Sharon Bottoms (later Sharon Mattes) in 1993 sued for custody of Bottoms’ child after Bottoms began a relationship with another woman. Much of the court hearing centered on what the women did in their bedroom, which the judge said was “illegal and immoral,” making Bottoms an unfit parent. The court granted custody to the mother, although Bottoms claimed she (Bottoms) had been molested by her mother’s live-in boyfriend when she was a teen. Bottoms appealed, but after three years of legal battles, stopped the custody fight, wanting to spare her 5-year-old son more turmoil, per Carlos Ball’s The Right to be Parents. She continued to challenge a restriction preventing her from even visiting with her son if her partner was present, but in 1999, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld that as well.
More recently, too, parents with trans and nonbinary children have also faced allegations of abuse and been investigated by CPS simply for affirming their children’s identities. Most seem to have been in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott (R) issued a directive in 2022 that medically necessary health care for treating gender dysphoria should be considered a form of child abuse. The ACLU has two cases, PFLAG v. Abbott and Doe v. Abbott, which are challenging that policy. (NCLR, in partnership with several other LGBTQ organizations, offers a resource on “Parenting a Transgender or Gender-Expansive Child: How to Protect Your Family Against False Allegations of Child Abuse,” that may be useful for families who feel they could be targeted.)
Finding Strength
None of the situations above is identical to that of the Buttigiegs, but they do show some of the context through which LGBTQ families may be viewing the family’s situation: we know how vulnerable our families have been to false accusations of improper conduct.
Things have gotten better for LGBTQ parents over the years, though; courts now almost never deny custody explicitly because of a parent’s LGBTQ identity (though they may exhibit bias in more subtle ways), and LGBTQ parents, even nongestational and nongenetic ones, have access to a greater range of legal protections. But the country as a whole is now moving in a more anti-LGBTQ direction, so it pays to be vigilant.
We should remember, too, that the Buttigiegs were likely targeted because of their high profile. I do not believe that we LGBTQ parents as a whole should fear CPS knocking on our doors right now—although there is also an awful history of racism in CPS investigations, and a conflation of poverty and neglect, that mean some families may have more to worry about than others. Parents of trans and nonbinary children, too, particularly in Texas and other conservative states, have extra reasons to take precautions.
Regardless of your situation, though, know that there are people and organizations who have your back. We LGBTQ families are strong and resilient. We will stand up, speak out, and link arms to protect our children from harm. A concern for children has in fact propelled a big part of the LGBTQ rights movement. To cite just a few examples: the National Center for LGBTQ Rights was originally founded in 1977 to support lesbian mothers in custody battles and is now having an impact on a wide range of issues; nationwide marriage equality was won in large part by parents; Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE) came out of two older organizations merging in a desire for a stronger response to the situation in Texas. And groups specific to LGBTQ families have had a positive impact on policy, representation, and personal lives for decades: PFLAG was founded in 1972 by a mother in support of her son and now has a network of over 360 chapters and 550,000 members and supporters; gay fathers joined together in 1979 to create the organization that is now Family Equality, serving all LGBTQ families, and from which spun off COLAGE, an organization by and for people with LGBTQ parents. We know how to mobilize for our families.
I hope that whoever targeted the Buttigiegs is caught and faces justice. I wish their family safety and peace. More broadly, though, I hope that no LGBTQ parent or parent of an LGBTQ child has to fear that their children will be taken away because of anti-LGBTQ bias. May we all keep working toward that goal.