This guide to family creation by Dr. Bradford Kolb, president and medical director of HRC Fertility (not affiliated with advocacy group HRC), and brand consultant Malinda Maerker, offers a lot of information here about LGBTQ family making, along with some inspiring profiles of individual families, although the book is somewhat uneven in its range of interviewees and not fully inclusive of trans and nonbinary identities.
The volume includes three parts. The first is a collection of interviews with real LGBTQ families, offering a look both at how they started their families and what their lives are like now. There are four lesbian couples, five gay male couples and one single gay father, one gay dad and his surrogate, one single bisexual mom, one transgender man and queer woman couple, and one lesbian couple co-parenting with a gay male couple. Readers should appreciate the personal details about both the joys and the challenges of forming and raising a family.
The interviewees include blogger and entertainer Perez Hilton; television writer, director, and producer Ryan Murphy; and Emmy Award-winning executive producer at ABC News, John R. Green. There are two men who are current or former heads of nonprofits dedicated to queer families: Ron Poole-Dayan, executive director of Men Having Babies; and activist Gabriel Blau, former CEO of Family Equality. The other interviewees include less high-profile folks—a police officer, an Air Force doctor, a minister, a gym owner, and a university professor among them. There is no information about how these families were chosen for inclusion in the book, however; some additional transgender and bisexual parents (and any nonbinary parents) would have been welcome. There are several families of color and interracial families as well as White families.
The second part of the book includes advice from experts on adoption, assisted reproduction, fertility law, and the psychological and sociological aspects of queer family making, presented in Q&A format. The section on adoption, however, only covers adoption from foster care, since that’s the focus of RaiseAChild, whose executive director, Rich Valenza, is the chosen expert. The book would have benefited from an additional expert or two on international and private adoptions. The Q&A with Valenza also veers from general questions on the adoption process to questions about Valenza’s personal experience as an adoptive parent, which feel like they should have gone into a profile in the first part of the book.
The third part of the book, by Dr. Kolb, explores the full range of reproductive possibilities for LGBTQ people, with an overview of the biology involved, the testing and procedures to expect at a fertility clinic, possible problems in conceiving and how to minimize the chance of them, and more. This section is informative if somewhat dry. Most of the space is dedicated to a section on “Lesbians and Bisexual Women” and one on “Gay and Bisexual Men.” There is a much smaller part on “Trans Women and Trans Men,” mostly about the impact of going off hormone therapy, though the formatting of the header makes it seem as if this is part of the section on “Gay and Bisexual Men.” The first two sections also use gendered language (“women who want to maximize their chances of getting pregnant”; “men who have no motility in their sperm”), but that only works if one assumes that the lesbians, bi women, gay men, and bi men are all cisgender. Much of the information on fertility in those sections, however, is also applicable to trans and nonbinary readers, just not with those labels. (A trans man might be interested in the section about getting pregnant, for example—but that’s in the section for “Lesbians and Bisexual Women.”) Titling these sections differently and using non-gendered language would have been more inclusive.
I also have to question the sentence that says, “The hormonal changes in the brain necessary to achieve conception also require trans men and trans women to step back into a gender role with which they do not identify.” No—a gender role is one’s actions, in relation to cultural norms of gender. It’s not related to hormones. Yes, going off hormones can sometimes result in gender dysmorphia—but for a more nuanced explanation, see this lesson on trans fertility at FertilityIQ, as well as this one about resilience strategies.
Some awkward phrases and typos also betray the self-published nature of the book.
