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 Rachel Epstein is the editor of the recent anthology “Who’s Your Daddy? And Other Writings On Queer Parenting,” which includes essays, stories, and information about lesbian, gay, transgender and queer parenting. Since 2001, Epstein has also been the co-ordinator of the LGBTQ Parenting Network in Shelbourne, Ontario. Located at the Shelbourne Health Center, near Toronto, it is a place for dicussion forums, picnics, training to service providers, lectures and research, as well as a place for queer parents to simply enjoy their families.
Epstein is presenting her anthology at book launches in select Canadian cities, including an upcoming date in Vancouver, BC, of which Epstein says, “I’m very excited for it, partly because it’s my hometown. I’m coming back to Vancouver where I haven’t lived for 23 years and I feel like I’m coming back to the community that I came out in... It’s great to come back to my old community and have a conversation about this. It’s also great that it is at the Rhizome Café, which seems like a cool place, and I think it’s going to be fun.” The launch is on November 22, 2009 from 5 to 7 pm at the Rhizome Café on 317 East Broadway.
Spreading the word about “Who’s Your Daddy” has taken Epstein all across Canada. “We have something happening in Ottawa, we have something in New York, we hooked up with queer parenting and COLAGE groups in New York, and there is going to be something there in December. We also went to Maynooth Pride, a small town outside of Algonquin Park, where two gay men run a bed and breakfast there. My hope for this book is that it starts conversations. There is so much diversity in the writing and it raises questions. I hope that in turn, people raise interesting discussions and questions,” explained Epstein.
The anthology was made for a number of reasons, not the least of it to increase visibility and awareness of LGBTQ families. “For 25 plus years now, work has taken me to interesting and great places. I’m really aware of our history, that we come from a place where we weren’t allowed to have children or they were taken away from us. Like I write in the intro, 88 percent of lesbians fighting for custody of their children lost so we have been put in this position to defend ourselves for all these years and to somehow prove that our kids will turn out normal and just like the kids that are raised in hereterosexual families. Right now here in Canada and parts of America, we have achieved a certain level of social acceptance, not that it's total by any means, and a certain amount of protection in law. We can take more risks and talk about the realities of our families, the good things and the bumps, and what’s frustrating, challenging and joyous. The book is an attempt to have more conversations about that. Let’s shift the conversation away from defining ourselves and lets talk about what it's really like. Underlying that is to make sure that as queer parents we don’t deny ourselves as sexual beings, because part of that defense has been to dissociate from our sexuality, 'cause we are seen to be all about sex and all we think about is sex. It’s important that we embrace our sexuality, our queerness, our histories and our parenting. We offer something to our kids that is rich in that.”
For many queer parents and their children, there is a fear that they will get attacked because their kids turn out queer as well. “There’s been a whole fear in queer communities about getting attacked that your kids are going to be queer, that we are 'recruiting.' There are all these studies done that the kids don’t all come out queer, and that they are no more likely that any kid in any other household to come out queer. They call themselves 'second generation,' queer kids or queer parents, and at one point there was some fear in our community about that.”
“If you are queer and you have a queer kid, it's like OMG you’re going to get attacked, as if there’s something wrong with it. I would say on the whole that if you asked queer parents what sexuality their kid would have, you're never supposed to say I would love my kid to be queer, right? Probably some secretly would think that, but generally people want to create an open space for their kids, a space that welcomes and admits that there is sexual diversity. Again, you can’t make generalizations about our families because people parent differently. But in general I think there are more spaces being created for our kids where there is room for them to discover their sexuality and room to explore.”
“There was this interesting finding, Judith Stacy did this study recently where she looked at 15 years of kids growing up with lesbian moms and found that the kids were more likely to be sexually explorative and have had or would admit to same-sex relationships. It makes a lot of sense to me, because our kids are probably going to be more open to sexual diversity. I don’t think it’s as scary for a queer spawn to come out as straight to their parents as it is for a queer kid to come our to their straight parents.”
Queer parents also want to protect their kids from experiencing what they all too often face themselves -- homophobia. “There is some element of protection, we always want to protect our kids, especially if you have experienced pain and discrimination. But I also feel that argument doesn’t balance the joy that can come with being queer. Lisa Hart’s piece [in “Who’s Your Daddy”] is really interesting because she really wanted to be a lesbian and adored her lesbian mom and her friends. Her piece raises an interesting issue for queer spawn about where do our kids fit in our queer communities, especially the ones that identify as straight. She is talking about being culturally queer, and my daughter would say the same. I have a 17-year-old daughter and she would say that I identify as culturally queer, and she is still figuring out her sexuality. Sometimes kids that identify as straight feel that there is no place for them in our communities, but it’s also a place of home and comfort. I feel like it’s a challenge for us as our kids get older to find spaces for them.”
Epstein admits that while same sex marriage is of some importance, it is not inherently tied to queer parenting. “I am actually quite pleased, I guess, that in Canada, legally they don’t have much to do with each other. The fact that you are legally married doesn’t change the fact that you also have queer parenting rights. I really believe that in my mind parenting and partnering are two things that should be separate. Not that I think people haven’t been affected by the same sex marriage debate or have chosen to get married or not to get married. David Rayside has an article about that in the book where he compares the States to Canada. I feel like they are struggling in the States figuring out how to approach the marriage thing and in some places the two are linked in terms or marriage and parenting and I think it makes it much more difficult.”
“I think one of the strengths that queer people bring to parenting is that we have had to create our own families and think about what family means and also because how we bring kids into our life is so conscious, there’s so much thought put into it. So, family is certainly something we think about a lot, it’s a strength and it’s not really that relevant that people are married. Once again there are people that are coming together to parent who aren’t in even in sexual, romantic relationships like families with three or four parents. I think it’s more about securing the rights that we need for all families rather than a two-parent model that doesn’t really work for everyone.”
Queer parenting families are not necessarily between two parents. “I think that that’s one of the traps that I hope that we don’t fall into. That idea of the two parent, nuclear family is so profoundly embedded in our culture. One of the exciting things about queer parenting is that sometimes we offer our families differently. That’s why its important that we show that in the book, there’s an article with young, queer parents and another with single dyke moms, interviews with people talking about co-parenting, interviews with donor dads and how they fit into our families. It was important to me that there was an article about polyamoury, and if you are living a polyamorous life and how you fit parenting into that.”
“I think that now we are having children, more and more of us, people are more comfortable with it if we look like that nuclear family. We did the adoption study in Ontario where we surveyed adoption licensees and interviewed queer people who have used the adoption system. It’s clear in that adoption system if you look like that two-parent family, it’s easy for people to get around it and relate to something familiar to them, something that they know. One of my fears is that families that don’t look like that will become more marginalized.”
In the LGBT community, there are many cultural myths about bisexuality, which sometimes bleed into adoption policies. “There is that piece in the book about bisexuality and the adoption system, which is one of the interesting and surprising findings, though maybe it shouldn’t have been, from that study. Bisexual people really came up against some barriers; you know the myths of bisexuality, that it’s unstable and promiscuous, and you sleep with everything that moves. There was an example of a bi couple, a man and a woman, and it came up in their home study that he had marched naked in Toronto pride. The social worker freaked out, 'OMG does your wife know, have I discovered a closeted gay man here.' Of course his wife had known, his wife was at Pride too. And there was another single woman who was kind of read by the people doing the home study as a lesbian. She chose not to talk about relationships with men, because it was more easy to be seen as a single lesbian.”
Gay men occupy a special position in queer parenting because they can be sperm donors, fathers or both. “Some men just want to be sperm donors and are not involved at all and there is sort of a whole continuum right up to men who are thought and think themselves as fathers. I teach this course called Dykes Finding Tykes and we have a similar one called Daddies and Papas 2B, where we spend a lot of time talking about those issues around anonymous and known sperm donation. There is a whole move worldwide to more openness on sperm donation. At the same time, if you use a known sperm donor there are a bunch of legal barriers. If you talk to the lawyers they would say never do it. However, people are working it out, but lawyers see the worst case scenarios and ward people off it. There is a lot of negotiation and trust that needs to happen.”
"It forces us to think about biology in our lives and what is blood all about, where does race lie and the relationship between them. People have to think about that and we live in a culture that promotes biological connections that are seen to be more personal and important. Sometimes when gay men are choosing a surrogacy route because they want a biological connection to their child. People come into the Dykes finding Tykes course and see that they really want to do adoption. Instead they see that lots of kids in the world need homes, so why not help them. No one has to get pregnant and no one has to give birth. People make both decisions all the time and I feel that my role as a facilitator of these groups is to provide info on all the options and let people decide for themselves.”
“Inter-racial or bi-racial couples are adopting kids who may or may not match the parents as well. There are white people adopting kids of color. There is the complex issue of race and racism, and what does it mean to be parenting a kid that is going to experience racism differently from you. It’s good to call on the people who have fought through that in the adoption system and get info. You hear people say stuff like I’m colorblind and race doesn’t matter, all that matters is love. Love is wonderful, but we live in a world that has power differentials and it’s important that we think about those things.”
“There’s a fear that they would not have a deep connection with their own culture and how do you do that in a way that is not token. With some adult adoptees, it took them sometime to notice that they weren’t white, but we are having conversations with them.”
Recently, the dilemma around babies who are born and children who grow up intersexed has come to light, and its also applies to queer parenting. “It comes up in the broad education that we do with biology and gender identity and sexual orientation and having people understand what intersexuality is. Our work is more around queer parents rights as opposed to queer, intersexed or gender variant kids, but I feel like there is a move towards including those experiences of these kids who don’t fit in terms of gender at an early age, who sometimes get brutally punished for that, brutally told that they can’t be a certain way. It’s interesting that one of the myths of queer parenting is that our kids won’t understand gender and will be confused on what it means to be a boy to be a girl. Underlying that assumption that we want our kids to be traditional boys and girls. What we have to offer is an expansion of what sex and gender are all about for our and all kids.”
In 2008, Thomas Beatie gave birth to his daughter, one of first recognized trans men to do such. “There probably aren’t that many trans men who have been pregnant but I think there is increasing numbers and it’s very challenging for people to think about pregnant men. One of the articles in the book is about going to a fertility clinic and waiting for an ultrasound. It is a very different experience for a trans man and there is lots of educational work that needs to be done. We do workshops with fertility clinics to think through the language that they are going to use and where are the bathrooms and how are they marked in terms of gender. It’s challenging the world in a big way and more and more people are going to be doing it.”
Inside “Who’s Your Daddy” you can also find the WISEUP model, which Epstein discovered at an adoption conference in Toronto. “This model gives adopted kids a simple way to respond to those intrusive questions they get about whose your real mom and all. It stands for Walkaway, It’s personal, you can choose Share info, Educate and give people more info. It’s so applicable to queer families because our kids get asked all these questions all the time.”
A object of contention is often whether both parents can put their names on the child’s birth certificate. “There was a Charter challenge in 2006 that allowed two women who have a child and have used an anonymous sperm donor to put both women’s names on the birth certificate. Where it gets complicated is if you have a known sperm donor. With that you need a second parent adoption, which costs at least 2000 dollars and time. Also, people resent the fact that they have to adopt their own children.”
"There has also been a case called “'AABBCC,' a lesbian couple and a man who wanted all three names on the certificate. They lost it and then won it on appeal. That was kind of a precedent because it was the first time it recognized three parents and was outside of a conjugal, spousal relationship. However it’s not automatic, you can’t just go and put 3 people down on a birth certificate. You have to go in front of a judge and it’s in the best interest of the child. On the legal front I feel we take little bricks out of the wall slowly year by year.”
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