Dykes and Tikes on bikes: celebrating Pride with my family
We celebrated Pride weekend in August this year, and it was a hot one. Saturday was the Dyke March, which we tapped into later in the day. I had zero intention of braving a crowd of 650,000 people with a fiercely teething and mobile infant and his fearless three-year-old sister and decided to lay low. Back in my twenties, Pride was about volume. Do more, see more, flirt more, be more queer.
My husband and I expanded our family by placing our twins for adoption
My twins are eleven days old, and they’re so beautiful I can barely look at them. I’m wildly, deeply in love with them, feeling all the feelings I felt when my older two daughters were born. In spite of these feelings (and, paradoxically, because of them), my husband and I chose not to raise these girls ourselves, instead placing them with an adoptive family.
I am a transgender dad in a gay relationship who breastfeeds his baby boy
Near the end of my pregnancy, I went to my first breastfeeding support meeting, facilitated by La Leche League. I was excited at the opportunity to learn, and terribly nervous in a room full of strangers — I was a guy at a women-only peer-to-peer help group. When it came to be my turn to speak, I gave my carefully prepared spiel: “My name is Trevor and I am able to be pregnant because I am transgender.”
Planned Parenting: how I found a childless community with my LGBT friends
For two-and-a-half years I walked through life like a ghost, waiting for my baby. Then I discovered I could not conceive a child with my partner. Suddenly, that hope and suspense was gone. A simple biological fact I had assumed was my birthright vaporized before my eyes. One day I was kvetching to my best friend — who is gay — about this shocking news, and he stopped me and said. “Listen: this is new to you, but it’s not new to me. So don’t you walk in my door talking about doom and gloom. You have to understand, this is just our life. It’s been our life, and now it’s yours, too.
Queer Parenting for Heteros (and anyone else who wants to teach kids that being queer is awesome)
Well, a lot has been said and written about queer parenting in recent years, but most of this commentary ignores the opportunity to actually engage queer theory and instead simply equates queer parenting with LGBT people raising children. But what happens when we attempt to apply the insights of queer theory to our relationships with children?
Our half-Mexican daughter was born at home on Dia de los Muertos
On Halloween night 2010, at 12:57am I rolled over in bed and felt my bag of waters breaking. I managed to get out of bed without getting the bed wet and as I was running to the bathroom, water gushed out all over the kitchen and bathroom floor. It was a gush like in the movies. As I was running I yelled to my wife Liz, “My water just broke!”
Using my wife’s brother as sperm donor – how we talk about it with family & kids
My partner and I (both women) have been thinking a lot about starting a family. We’ve thought about using a donor, and always come back to the possibility of asking my partner’s brother how he would feel about donating his sperm for us to start a family. It seems like a good option on some level — we would know about the baby’s biological history, and the baby would have both our genes.
Mother of Transgender toddler gets a lesson in love
In some ways, and to many observers, my child’s transition seemed to have happened overnight. But Izzy has always been a boy dressed like a girl.