Who's Your Baby Daddy?

No doubt all of you who used to read this blog have since given me up for dead. Or at least, so utterly overwhelmed by the often competing demands of parenthood, partnership, and academia that I rarely have time to surface for air, let alone type a blog entry. I'm happy to report that I am still breathing, but seriously folks, this gig is hard work.

I am however popping in to post, per reader request, a copy of my article that appeared in Rad Dad a few months ago. I encourage you to email Tomas and buy yourselves a real life copy, but in the meantime, my piece is below. I wrote this article over the winter, but I've been thinking about these issues again lately as we prepare to start the proceedings for a second-parent adoption, which will legally recognize J as Ocean's parent. I will post J's companion piece soon as well, and I look forward to the comments of anyone who might still be reading this...

Parenting from the Margins:
On Queer Mamas and Trannie Papas

It never occurred to me that my kid would have a dad.

When I began my journey to parenthood, I was single. I had just spent the summer in San Francisco, doing dissertation research and going on a lot of dates with women I met online. I’m not sure exactly when I stopped looking at craigslist ads and started looking at sperm donor profiles, but in some eerie way, the two were not so different.

San Francisco was in many ways the perfect place to begin thinking about queer babymaking. Though my New England town was liberal enough, I didn’t know other queer families. Or at least, no queer families that looked like me. Sure, I had met some lesbian couples in their forties with well-paying jobs and Volvo SUVs and several small children, but, as a broke, single grad student living on the edges, these women simply could not serve as models for me as I attempted to think about what my family might look like. In San Francisco, however, I met young queers with kids; single dyke moms who were poor but happy; butch/femme and trannie couples trying to get pregnant. Everyone knew someone who was currently making withdrawals from the sperm bank, and some of those people actually looked a little bit like me.

I went back to New England empowered. I kept going on craigslist dates (much less satisfying than in San Francisco), kept working on my dissertation, and started to put in place the pieces for beginning my own babymaking adventure.

The following spring, I did my first insemination. By that point, I had an amazing community of friends lined up to help, a student loan to pay for my sperm, and a decidedly ambivalent girlfriend, who wasn’t sure that she was ready to be a parent. Six months, one miscarriage, and ten vials of sperm later, I found myself with a pregnancy that stuck. My girlfriend, however, didn’t, and as I battled my way through the nausea, mood swings, and anxieties of the first trimester, I made my peace with becoming a single parent.

Except, that isn’t what happened. Instead, I got a trannie boyfriend, who eventually turned into my kid’s dad.

Jack and I started dating when I was 16 weeks pregnant. We had been friends for a long time, and had dated briefly a year before. We had always been attracted to one another, and, finally single at the same time, found ourselves spending much of our time together. Dating during pregnancy was a thrilling and terrifying thing, so exciting, so intimate, and at times, so scary. I will never forget the first time we felt the baby kick together. It was amazing to share this time of profound discovery with another person, and I could not have done it with anyone I didn’t think would be around for the long haul. When I finally gave birth to my daughter Ocean, Jack was there, holding my hand, and I felt incredibly lucky to be supported by such a great partner.

So, that’s how I usually tell the story of our family, and it is, overall, a very happy one. But, I want to write today about the complications of being a queer woman who is parenting a kid with someone who identifies as “Dad.”

My partner identifies as trans, and genderqueer. He does not take hormones. He has not had surgery. He probably will never do these things. He doesn’t often pass as male, and he is okay with that. He is not, in short, trying to “be a man.” He does, however, feel that male pronouns fit him better than female pronouns do. In some way, his sense of self is better expressed linguistically through masculine language; just as he feels more comfortable in clothes from the men’s department, so too with male pronouns and labels.

I have always had a deep commitment to understanding gender as part of a spectrum of identity, and not as something that is tied to biological sex. Not many people do the work of unpacking the many complicated layers of gendered identity that constitute us. Fewer still make the brave and sometimes difficult choice to present themselves to the world in a way that rejects the traditional male/female binary. The fact that Jack thinks about these things, does these things, is part of why I love him. I thoroughly admire the courage and intelligence with which he approaches gender and identity.

And yet, in spite of this, I found myself completely unprepared for my reaction to our conversations about what our daughter would call him. When Jack first suggested that he would like to be Dad, my immediate retort was, “But my kid doesn’t have a dad!” In thinking about where this response came from, I’ve come to realize that it represents more than my knee-jerk reaction to the notion of a parental figure for whom I hadn’t planned, or my baggage around the faults and failings of my own father. Indeed, it highlights the many ways in which queer and trans families are still so marginalized and invisible that we simply don’t have the language to talk about them.

Becoming a queer parent means constantly educating the people around you about everything from sperm banks to gay rights to the workings of the female reproductive system. And for some of us, it means explaining, over and over again, that no, there is no dad. This was a conversation that would happen again and again in my pregnancy, and indeed, afterwards as well. I’d be at the airport, the library, or announcing my good news to a neighbor, and I would get what seemed to me a massively invasive and inappropriate question: “So, who’s the father?” Sometimes it would be cloaked in a seemingly more innocuous guise, as in, “What color eyes does Daddy have?” But either way, it assumed the presence of a male partner in my life, and I found that offensive and exhausting. Nine times out of ten, I would do the work of explaining that I had gotten pregnant from anonymous donor sperm, that I was, in fact, queer, and that no, my kid would not have a “daddy.” Sometimes, when particularly tired and cranky I would be a bit snarky about it, and simply say, “Nope, there is no father.” But, I never let anyone go on thinking that I was a heterosexually partnered woman, having a baby with “daddy.”

When Jack arrived on the scene as my co-parent, the conversations became more complicated. People would ask the same inane questions about “daddy’s hair,” and I would begin to fire off my well-practiced treatise on how my daughter didn’t have a father. Except that suddenly, she did.

Now, when we are all out together, we are clearly read as a queer family. (This presents another set of challenges, since many people assume that Jack uses female pronouns, but he, and now we, are more used to dealing with that one.) However, when I’m by myself, or out somewhere with only our daughter, and I refer to my male partner, or to my Ocean’s papa, people automatically assume that I am straight, with a biologically male partner (husband, even) who provided the sperm that made our baby. Sometimes I correct them, and explain our situation. But other times, for a variety of reasons, I don’t. Sometimes the conversation is too fleeting, and the moment is already passed. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to do a workshop on Trans 101. And sometimes, I simply act and speak exactly as I would if I had a female-identified partner, except that I use the pronouns Jack prefers. But, as I leave these situations, I always feel uncomfortable, slightly dishonest, and a little afraid.

Why is it harder for me to be open about our family than it would be if I were still a single parent, or partnered to a woman? Much of it has to do with the fact that trans people and trans families are simply not on most people’s radar. If I tell someone that I’m a lesbian, they almost always know what that means. If I tell someone I’m queer, they sometimes do. If I tell someone that my partner is trans, they often just stare at me blankly. We live in a reasonably progressive town. People are ready, at least somewhat, for “Heather has two mommies.” But, they still don’t know what to do with “Ocean has a trannie daddy.”

And then, though it rarely rises to the surface, there is always the fear that in coming out as a trans family, we will put ourselves in danger, or compromise in some way our daughter’s wellbeing. Our state, Rhode Island, is one of thirteen in the country with laws on the books to protect people against discrimination based on gender identity and expression. However, as we all know, there is often a large gap between what the law dictates and many people’s lived experiences. As Jack and I finish our degrees and think about the job search and potential relocation, issues of safety become even more pronounced. The conventional wisdom that newly minted PhDs must take any job they can get simply doesn’t work for us. We are not willing to be the only out queer family in a small town in a red state. We want to raise a daughter who is proud of her family, and talks about us honestly, without shame or fear. We find it hard enough to do that in Providence, Rhode Island. What hope is there for us in rural Oklahoma?

I’m not sure where the answers lie. I look forward to a day when queer and trans families are commonly recognized as par for the course. I look forward to a day when I can refer to Jack as Ocean’s papa, and people neither think that it’s strange, nor think that we’re straight. I look forward to a day when our ideas about family are rooted less in biology than in a recognition of the bonds of love and commitment that hold groups of people together. Until then, we’ll continue to muddle through an imperfect world, using language that sometimes only half fits. My hope is that in doing so, we are continuously expanding the definitions of mama, papa, and indeed, family itself. I like to think that in doing this work, in living on the edges in a visible sort of way, we are opening up the possibilities for families that come after ours, and creating new structures for talking about identity, relationships, and love.