New Film Shares Story of Single Trans Dad Who Gave Birth
A new documentary getting rave reviews tells the story of a single trans dad and his journey to becoming a parent by carrying his child.
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Watch: “Just Another Beautiful Family” Tells Story of Trans Dad, Queer Mom, and Their Five Kids
For those of us of a certain age, any large, blended family brings to mind television classic The Brady Bunch–but Nick and Katherine North are a very real family, whose award-winning, 20-minute documentary tells how they fell in love, became a blended family with five kids, and navigated Nick’s gender transition from female to male. Watch it free, in full, right here. It just might be the sweetest thing you’ll see on the Internet today.
Divorce, Reproductive Losses, and Other Queer “Failures”
When the first same-sex couple to marry legally in the United States, Hillary and Julie Goodridge, was feeling stressed from public attention, they didn’t want to seek couples’ counseling. Julie told NPR this past May, “It felt like too much of a risk.” They divorced a few years later. Their daughter Annie, who was 10 at the time, said in retrospect, “I felt like our family let everyone down.” Their situation highlights a long-time problem for the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups: the pressure to be perfect. Two new books, however, each look at topics often associated with failure—relationship break-ups and reproductive losses—in order to help LGBTQ people and our children better navigate them.
New LGBTQ Picture Books for Back-to-School
For back-to-school time, here are some new and soon-to-be-published picture books with LGBTQ and gender creative characters, all involving schools and classmates.
Over the Corporate Rainbow
This past Pride Month saw an explosion of rainbows on products from sneakers to snack foods, reenergizing the debate over whether and how corporate America should be involved in Pride. For me, two things come to bear here: My belief that companies should support LGBTQ equality if they are going to market to us—and the fact that my family would not exist as it does now if it was not for the benefits my spouse and I received from the companies where we worked.
J.P. Morgan and Others Boost Fertility Benefits for LGBTQ Employees
Financial giant J.P. Morgan has announced it will soon offer expanded fertility benefits aimed at helping LGBTQ employees start or grow their families. Let’s take the opportunity, then, to look at what they and other companies are doing—or should be.
Watch: A Queer Couple’s Continuing Journey as Foster Parents
Nicole Opper and Kristan Cassady’s The F Word docuseries in 2017 showed us the beginning of their journey to parenthood through the foster-to-adoption process. Now, they’re back with Season Two, which continues their story and adds in the stories of others.
Mother’s Day as an Act of Resistance
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be fraught times for LGBTQ parents and our children, seemingly designed to underscore that our families are different. I try to see them, however, as opportunities to remind the world that queer families exist. By raising our voices on these days—or sometimes, simply being visible—we resist the attempts of those trying to ignore or eliminate us, and we welcome all who take on the mantle of parenthood.
Passover Reflections on Faith, Freedom, and Family
I’ve been celebrating the spring holidays with my interfaith family and reflecting that Passover and Easter this year come in the shadow of ongoing and spiteful religious exemption laws in a growing number of states and in the federal government. These laws, widely seen as targeting the LGBTQ community, would allow people to cite their religious beliefs as a reason to discriminate against others. I have to remind myself, however, that we shouldn’t set religion and LGBTQ equality as necessarily opposing forces.
The Costs of Starting a Queer Family
The always wonderful Nancy podcast from WNYC has just run a series on Queer Money Matters, about “the straight economy and how queer people navigate it.” Listen here to their episode on “Babies and Bills,” about the costs of starting a family when queer.
