How Same-Sex Couples Divide Chores, and What It Shows About Modern Parenting

When gay and lesbian couples have children, they often begin to divide chores as heterosexual couples do.

When straight couples divide up the chores of daily life — who cooks dinner and who mows the lawn, who schedules the children’s activities and who takes out the trash — the duties are often determined by gender.

Same-sex couples, research has consistently found, divide up chores more equally.divide chores

But recent research has uncovered a twist. When gay and lesbian couples have children, they often begin to divide things as heterosexual couples do, according to new data for larger, more representative samples of the gay population. Though the couples are still more equitable, one partner often has higher earnings, and one a greater share of household chores and child care. It shows these roles are not just about gender: Work and much of society are still built for single-earner families.

“Once you have children, it starts to almost pressure the couple into this kind of division of labor, and we’re seeing this now even in same-sex couples,” said Robert-Jay Green, professor emeritus at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco. “Circumstances conspire on every level to get you to fall back in this traditional role.”

Such circumstances include employers who expect round-the-clock availability, and the absence of paid parental leave and public preschool. It’s also smaller things, like pediatricians, teachers or grandparents who assume that one parent is the primary one.

“For, me, the choice to stay home seems easier than us both working and both stressing about who’s going to do what,” said Sarah Pruis, who is raising five children with her wife, who works full time, in Cheyenne, Wyo. “That just seems impossible.”

Gary Becker, the Nobel-winning economist, proposed a theory that marriage was about efficiency: Husbands specialized in earning and wives in homemaking and child rearing. But in recent decades, as women have gained reproductive rights and a foothold in the labor force, marriage has become more about companionship.

Yet women married to men — even when they work and earn as much as or more than their husbands — still do more domestic work, and social scientists have found that the duties are gendered. Feminine chores are mainly indoor and done frequently: cooking, cleaning, laundry and child care. Masculine chores are mostly outdoor and less frequent: taking out the trash, mowing the lawn or washing the car.

by Claire Cane Miller, New York Times, May 16, 2018

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Why we need to break the silence around domestic violence in LGBTQ families

In seventh-grade health class we watched a movie about alcoholic parents.

It was the first time I saw anything that resembled my family in a movie — the same yelling, crying and sporadic violence — except my parents never drank. I knew something was terribly wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. It would be three more years before I’d learn that the problems in my family resulted from mental illness. My mother’s partner had bipolar disorder.lgbt domestic violence

There was no health-class movie about bipolar parents, no helpline to call back in the 1980s. Even if there were one, I couldn’t have called it. My family was in the closet — my mother was a lesbian, and if people found out, she or her partner could lose their jobs. If they lost their jobs, we’d lose the house, and my biological father would have a very large weapon if he decided to fight for custody. There was another layer to the problem, too. There were so few visible lesbian families that I knew that confessing my family problems would reflect negatively on the whole queer community, people who were constantly struggling to be seen as equal to their heterosexual counterparts.

As a child of lesbian parents, I felt like I needed to be normal, well adjusted and heterosexual. My parents told me that many people thought gay people were perverts who wanted to hurt children or turn them gay. I understood that it was imperative not to throw my family like chum into the shark-infested water; doing so would be risky not only for our family but for all other queer families.

When I talk about the problems in my family, some people — usually heterosexual ones — are quick to point out that it’s important for me to clarify that not all lesbian families are like mine. But this should be a given. If a friend has a bipolar or alcoholic father, I don’t assume that all heterosexual men are alcoholics or suffer from mental illness. One family should never be singled out as a representative of their entire culture, but with so few visible gay families, it’s hard not to be treated as a voice for the movement.

by Lara Lillibridge, The Washington Post, May 8, 2018

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Unsung Heroes: Surrogate Mothers to Same-Sex Couples

Let’s give a nod to the surrogate mothers who simultaneously help queer people start families and move the needle on tolerance.

I loved my small-town upbringing, but even in that somewhat sheltered environment I always had a curiosity about other places, other people, and other experiences. Now as a gay fertility doctor often working with LGBT people to build their families, it’s rewarding to see the effect this LGBT family-building is having on changing the perspective about our community in small towns across the country.

Much of that change comes from an unlikely place.surrogacy

What I have learned in my work is that everyone involved in gay family-building becomes an ambassador for change. The gay parents, their family, and their child all open hearts and minds simply by living their lives.

Yet some of the most powerful agents of change are the surrogate mothers who spend nine months openly dedicated to helping people have children.

A large percentage of the surrogates I work with live in small towns across America. They often live in conservative areas that offer little interaction with LGBT people outside of whatever passes across their TV screens. Whether the hopeful parents I’m working with are gay, straight, bi — same-sex or opposite-sex couples — we rely on the willingness of women across the country to carry the babies of people who can’t otherwise have children.

I’ve found incredible enthusiasm from so many women when they learn the child they would be carrying is for a gay couple. Their dedication to helping other people build their dream family does not know prejudice. These women are a backbone of LGBT family-building, and their love has no bounds.

Yet their role in our movement extends beyond carrying the child for an LGBT person or same-sex couple. These women bring incredible pride to the service they provide others. They bring that message to their families, their friends and their local communities.

Even in those conservative small towns across America, they bring their pride in helping LGBT people have children.

Walking in the grocery store in their seventh and eighth month, people stop them to ask about the baby. At a friend’s house for dinner, they explain why they won’t be having any wine and a conversation about gay parents ensues. Their own husband and kids have to adjust a bit as mom’s lifestyle shifts for the baby she’s carrying.

The women I work with don’t hide from anyone the fact that it’s a trans woman or a gay couple whose baby she’s carrying.

I hear from the surrogates about these exchanges. They find it’s an opportunity to open people’s hearts and minds, often people who’ve never known an LGBT person.

by Dr. Guy Ringler, Advocate.com – May 11, 2018

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in Parenting / Recently Added / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Some L.G.B.T. Parents Reject the Names ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’

When Amanda Davidson, a 42-year-old Los Angeles-based artist and writer, welcomed her firstborn child in December — a boy named Felix — with her partner Isaac Schankler, 39, a composer, she chafed at the assumptions the medical staff members made about how the pair wanted to identify themselves as parents.

“‘Hi, Mommy! Where’s Daddy? Mommy needs to know this, but so does Daddy,’” she said with a big laugh. The binary clashed so much with how the couple sees themselves and exists in the world — she’s queer-identified, and her partner goes by pronouns they/their/them and uses the gender-neutral title Mx. — she refrained from calling herself anything vis-à-vis Felix for the first two weeks of his life.

She eventually settled on Mama. “I was racking my brain for a mama-alternate, but it feels right for the moment,” she said, adding that in her universe, “identity wiggles around,” and she’s open to other possibilities.estate planning

Mx. Schankler remembers reading the queer writer Andrea Lawlor’s essay on identifying as “Baba” (as opposed to some iteration of mother) in Mutha magazine and thinking that “dad” or “daddy” wouldn’t work for them either, so they opted for “Abba.” It means “dad” in Hebrew, providing a link to their Jewish heritage: “It does feel more gender-neutral, or at least doesn’t have quite the same baggage that dad and daddy have,” Mx. Schankler said.

Naming is particularly important to the pair as a means of signaling their queerness, since they “pass” as a straight couple. “We don’t look visibly queer,” Ms. Davidson said, “So in some ways, our choice of names helps us affirm our identities.”

The duo’s ambivalence about traditional monikers is reflected in a study, currently under peer review, on the naming practices in same-sex adoptive families. The study, by Abbie E. Goldberg, Clark University’s pioneering L.G.B.T. family scholar; Melissa Manley, a doctoral student, and Emma Frank, a recent Clark graduate, is one of the few on the topic. It found that of 80 participants — 20 lesbian couples and 20 gay couples — recruited from adoption agencies across the United States, including cities with high concentrations of lesbian and gay populations, all opted for derivatives of mother and father.

A quarter of them, however — 20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples — participated in some version of “undoing gender.” Many do this by taking parental names from their native cultures or religions that strip away the binary in this cultural context, collapsing the dichotomy between terms by merging them, such as “Mather,” a fusion of mother and father, or creating nicknames (“Muzzie,” in one instance).

Ellen Kahn, the director of the Children, Youth & Families Program at the Human Rights Campaign, said the gender binary that underlies “mother” and “father” doesn’t jibe with some parents’ self-understanding and self-presentation: “For queer parents who don’t think of themselves as gender conforming, ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ may be a little discordant with the way they think about themselves.”

Both Dr. Goldberg and Ms. Kahn surmise that the couples who are using new terminologies are willing to do so because of the hard-won rights L.G.B.T. people have secured, particularly the right to marry. “Now there’s more willingness to push some of those boundaries,” Dr. Goldberg said, “because of greater legal recognition and acceptance.”

by Stephanie Fairyington – New York Times April 26, 2018

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in Parenting / Personal Stories / Recently Added / Second Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

All Evidence Shows That Children of Gay Parents Do Just as Well as Their Peers

Multiple studies have been conducted over the years, countless research has been carried out and endless debates have been had, all to show one thing.

That the children of gay parents do just as well as the children of straight parents. The myth that kids need a mum and a dad to have a fulfilled childhood has been repeatedly, conclusively disproved – so why is it still so pervasive?studies show kid of gay parents do great

Such views are ultimately rooted in outdated notions of what constitutes a good upbringing, stemming from conservative ideals of the ‘nuclear family’, with a mum, a dad and 2.4 children. In many cases, objection to LGBT families is motivated by homophobia as well – a belief that there is something different, and therefore undesirable or lacking, about same-sex parenting. But last year, researchers conducted one of the most comprehensive studies into same-sex parenting that has ever been carried out.

Scientists looked into more than three decades worth of peer-reviewed research into how the children in same-sex-parented families did in comparison to their peers from opposite-sex-parented families. The wide-ranging study, published in the Medical Journal of Australia in October 2017, found what had already been shown in multiple previous studies – that the kids do just as well.

Among the studies reviewed were the 2017 public policy research portal at Columbia Law School in the US, which itself looked at 79 studies investigating the well-being of children raised by gay parents; a 2014 American Sociological Association review of more than 40 studies, which found that children fared just as well in a number of areas; and the Australian Institute of Family Studies’ review from 2013, which found that there was no evidence of harm.

Researchers behind the study, titled ‘The Kids are OK: it is Discrimination Not Same-Sex Parents that Harms Children’, said at the time: ‘The findings of these reviews reflects a broader consensus within the fields of family studies and psychology. It is family processes – parenting quality, parental wellbeing, the quality of and satisfaction with relationships in the family – rather than family structures that make a more meaningful difference to children’s wellbeing and positive development.’

They added that studies that had shown poor outcomes for LGBT-parented children had been widely criticised for their limited methodologies.

by Ashtitha Nagesh, February 18, 2018 – Metro.co.uk

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Interracial Gay Family Handbook

When same sex parents create families through transracial adoption, they must find ways to discuss racism, homophobia, instill positive racial identities, and honor their children’s birth culture.

If you don’t know this and what the benefits of transracial adoption are, it is worth considering before adopting. For so many same sex couples, transracial adoption is the best fit. If considering transracial adoption, there are many benefits and situations that should be discussed.interracial

Double Takes and Stares

We are a gay interracial couple – black and white – raising our two boys, black, with our mixed-raced daughter, who looks more white than anything else.

I personally identify with being black, because it carries the same combination of pride, remembrance and regret that “African American” was designed for. Thus, I prefer to raise our boys to also identify with being black. We will let our daughter decide what identity best fits her as she gets older.

Regardless if its black parents adopting white kids or white parents adopting black kids, families like ours typically garner lots of intention when in public.

Since our mixed-race daughter looks white, she and I often get double takes everywhere we go. I prefer to credit those double takes to our daughter’s beauty but reality dictates otherwise. Our first foster-to-adopt son (he has since been placed back with his birth mom) was white.  He and I also received stares wherever we went. I particularly despised the “is he yours” question, which made me feel self consciously black.

My white husband, Paul, receives similar double takes and stares, perhaps more, when he is in public with our black boys. On one occasion, he was approached by an older black woman asking, “where is the mother”? A polite reply would probably be the best response, but we typically respond with “none of your business” or “I am the mother”. Either way, we try to protect our children from such approaches by just removing ourselves from the situation.

Fascination with Hair 

The fascination with touching other people’s hair, particularly strangers, can be both frustrating and annoying. I have had situations where total strangers were fascinated with my boys’ hair because it “looks” and “feels” different. My advice would be to ask the child or their parent before touching his/her hair.

January  28, 2018 daddaddykids.com by Gregory Yorgey-Girdy

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in Adoption / Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Is America Growing Less Tolerant on L.G.B.T.Q. Rights?

When my sister came out, there was an accordion trio on hand to perform the music of Sly and the Family Stone.

Debutantes in white dresses and boys with matching cummberbunds and bowties drank from the waters of a gurgling champagne fountain. The entire affair, staged in my parents’ old house in Devon, Pa., was an anachronism, to be sure — but as wingdings go, it was tons of fun. It was 1975.

When I came out, in 2002, there wasn’t any party. There were tense meetings with the affirmative action/equal opportunity officer at my place of work; there was a carefully worded statement sent to my colleagues explaining exactly what “transgender” was; there was a series of conversations with my friends, and my mother, and the people whom I loved best, many of whom — in spite of their brave pledges to stand by me — ended those conversations in tears.

That was then.

People who “come out” at debutante parties have been off my radar for a long time now, although apparently they’re still going strong in some quarters. As for L.G.B.T.Q. people, “coming out” has gotten safer in fits and starts, not only in the wake of the Obergefell decision but also in other ways: L.G.B.T.Q. people are now visible in a way that was inconceivable half a generation ago. Most of the people that I thought I had lost after my 2002 unveiling have, miraculously, been returned to me, the intervening years having brought not only forgiveness but also understanding. Since my coming out, our family has thrived, and in the wake of that progress, I have believed that just as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted, the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice.

Until now.

Last week, GLAAD — the media advocacy group for L.G.B.T.Q. people (of which I was a national co-chairwoman from 2013 to 2017) — released the results of its latest “Accelerating Acceptance” survey at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While the biggest headlines from the forum focused on the fact that the president of the United States managed to get through an event on the world stage without shoving any prime ministers or calling anyone’s country an outhouse, the results of the poll, conducted by Harris, deserve attention as well. They are shocking.

For the first time since the poll began, support for L.G.B.T.Q. people has dropped, in all seven areas that the survey measured. They include “having an L.G.B.T. person at my place of worship” (24 percent of Americans are “very” or “somewhat” uncomfortable), seeing a same-sex couple holding hands (31 percent are uncomfortable) and “learning my child has an L.G.B.T. teacher at school” (37 percent are uncomfortable).

New York Times – by Jennifer Finney Boylan, January 29, 2018

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in Ethics / Legal / Legislation / Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Justice for All Means LGBT Families Too, Says Attorney Anthony Brown

Ask Anthony Brown, and he will tell you that in many ways, he’s had a maverick life. As an actor, as a lawyer, as a husband and a father.

Today, Anthony Brown’s work as an attorney helps LGBT clients navigate the tricky nuances of estate planning, wills and other legalities that keep worried families up at night. But the path to his current career was anything but straight.best interests of the child

Being gay is the least of it. When he arrived in New York in 1984, it was to attend Julliard to study acting. Just as he was about to graduate, Brown met the man who would one day become his husband, Gary Spino.

And, while he met with enough success to work as an actor, he had both bills to pay and time on his hands between jobs. On the road with a touring production of Romeo and Juliet, Brown discovered a massage table stashed behind a Coke machine and decided to make it — and massage — his next passion.

Serendipity struck once again when one of his massage clients turned out to be Tom Stoddard, one of the founders and guiding lights behind Lambda Legal, an organization doing much of the heavy legal lifting during the peak years of the AIDS crisis. “I was lucky enough to work with him during the last seven years of his life,” Brown says now. “He wrote New York’s anti-discrimination law protecting gays and lesbians, and he was a huge influence on me.”

Metrosource.com, By Kevin Phinney – January 12, 2018

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Why a patchwork of laws makes surrogacy more challenging in Atlantic Canada

On a wall in Terri Taylor’s home, opposite the window that looks onto the quiet Fredericton cul-de-sac on which generations of her family have grown up, there’s a series of family photos.

Some of them are pictures of her own children, ranging from their teen years to when they were toddlers.

Others feature twin baby girls, the much longed-for children of Iain and Haley, an Australian couple Taylor met through a surrogacy website.

Taylor isn’t related to the twins, Freya and Jenna — nor is she related to their parents.Canada

But she does consider them part of her family.

‘We grew our own family’

Taylor points to a picture of herself, her children, Haley and Iain, and the twins clustered together at the centre of the arrangement. This one is more than just another family photo — it’s also the outcome of her decision to become a surrogate.

“I didn’t just grow two babies, we grew our own family, so that centre one is a pretty good representation of that — my new and expanded family.”

In Canada, hundreds of women every year serve as surrogates for other people, and the number is increasing; when the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society started collecting statistics in 2001, around 100 women a year were acting as gestational surrogates, meaning they had no genetic relationship to the babies they were carrying.

Now that figure stands at more than 500, but demand still far outstrips supply.

For Taylor, serving as a surrogate was an extension of the same drive to care for others that had characterized her personal and professional life.

“I was never going to be rich, I was never going to donate a wing to a children’s hospital, so this was a way for me to give back.”

By Moira Donovan, CBC News, January 7, 2018

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in Assisted Reproductive Technology / Ethics / International / Legal / Recently Added / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Let’s set the record straight: There’s nothing wrong with surrogacy

This past December, Arizona Congressman Trent Franks resigned from office after asking two aides to be pregnant through surrogacy for him and his wife, reportedly offering one aide $5 million in return. According to reports, the women were concerned the congressman wanted to impregnate them through sexual intercourse.

The story went viral, causing confusion and stigma about one of the most life-changing medical advancements in history: the ability for females with prohibitive medical conditions, gay male couples, and parents of all ages to have biological children through surrogacy.

When it comes to fertility care, misinformation runs rampant. As fertility doctors, we’d like to set the record straight.

Surrogate mother word cloud concept

Surrogacy does not involve sexual intercourse

There are two main types of surrogacy: traditional and gestational. Traditional surrogacy means the female carrying the pregnancy (the surrogate) is using her own eggs. Different methods such as placing sperm in a uterus to help with fertilization (called intra-uterine insemination, or IUI) can be used to inseminate her with sperm from a male, who is often the intended parent. In this case, the surrogate is the biological mother. Gestational surrogacy, on the other hand, is when an embryo, which has been created using someone else’s egg and sperm, is transferred to a surrogate. The female carrying the pregnancy (the surrogate) is not biologically related to the child she is carrying.

Traditional surrogacy involves the insemination of the surrogate with sperm. Gestational surrogacy involves the implantation of an embryo. Neither requires sexual intercourse.

Surrogacy costs average $150,000, not $5 million

While pricey, surrogacy costs nothing close to the reported $5 million Congressman Franks offered his staffer. The average cost of surrogacy ranges from $100,000 to $200,000, depending on the fertility clinic used, number of IVF rounds, prenatal care, travel expenses, compensation for the surrogate, and additional medical and legal fees. These costs are mostly out-of-pocket and are prohibitively expensive for many people.

Facebook and Apple offer world-class fertility benefits that include surrogacy packages, but the tech firm juggernauts are in the minority. Most companies do not offer comprehensive fertility benefits that provide equal access to all employees. Unfortunately, far too many people still have to take out loans, borrow money from friends and family, raise money on crowdfunding sites, or forgo surrogacy altogether because of the high price point.

Surrogates undergo strict screening

It’s not easy to become a surrogate. Candidates go through a strict medical evaluation process before being approved as a carrier, including psychological screening, genetic screening, STD testing, and evaluations with reproductive specialists and a therapist. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine has recommended guidelines for gestational surrogates. 

Being approved is just the first step. As the surrogate prepares for an embryo transfer, she may take hormones daily. For gestational surrogacy, the intended mother or egg donor takes injectable medications to aid in retrieving eggs that will be fertilized to become embryos. The embryo is then ready to be transferred to a surrogate. And of course, once pregnant, surrogates attend routine prenatal visits and take on the burden of any pregnancy-related complications. 

Surrogacy is widely legal, but laws do vary

The legal landscape around surrogacy is often confusing, with laws varying between states and constantly changing. Though it’s widely regulated and legal throughout the majority of the country, most people are surprised to learn surrogacy is still illegal in some places in the United States Unfortunately, the complicated legal landscape can make access to this important aspect of fertility care more difficult.

TheHill.com, January 3, 2018 BY DR. ASIMA AHMAD AND DR. AMANDA ADELEYE

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in Ethics / Recently Added / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments