#queer adoption

[aussyndicalist]

Tell you what, hitting 30 and realising that you have...whatever it is that makes you pine to be a dragon, a mother, and a woman and only being able to achieve one of those really fucking sucks.

Somewhat adopting the youngest trans comrade in your local communist movement kinda helps, doesn't help when she figures out the dragon part by finding your blogs.

Now I just get teased about being an dragon with no eggs.

[vip3rpilot]

It’s 2am and I can’t sleep so it’s time for yet another round of getting emotional about passing lines in Brooklynn 99. /spoilers for S6E10 Gintars/

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This is a decent portrayal of the complexities of adoption. Gintars should never have been able to contact Charles, but once contact was made, Charles handed it...well, like Charles. He panicked, he felt threatened, he worried the stability of his relationship with his son would be undermined. But in the end, he made a brave decision, allowing Nikolaj to continue to meet with his birth father, trusting his son and the strength of their relationship. (Jake, of course, jumped the gun a bit and got Gintars arrested, leading to one of the only time we see Charles audibly mad at Jake.) When Charles and Jake talk about Nikolaj later, Charles does the thing I like the least in terms of adoptive terminology and then the thing I like the most, back-to-back: He says that no matter what he does, he’ll never be Nikolaj’s real father, but a few seconds later, acknowledges that he can’t control who Nikolaj views as his real parents. Terminology is incredibly personal when it comes to adoption. People’s relationships to their adopted families can be complex, layered, and difficult to boil down to a few syllables. How we talk about the people we care about is important. How other people talk about the people we care about is important. Language matters, even when it resists simplicity. And in the end, the adoptee is the only one who gets to decide who feels like family.* To me, my “real” parents are and always will be my adopted parents, the people who raised me. The idea that people might view them as “unreal parents” - parental simulacra, perhaps - simply because we don’t share DNA makes my blood boil. If my wife and I have kids it is my sincerest hope that they share at least a fraction of this sentiment. And the pain that Charles expressed, thinking that he wasn’t Nikolaj’s real father , that he somehow could never be good enough to earn that title...was gut-wrenching. I don’t ever want my parents to feel like that about parenting me. I don’t ever want my wife to feel that way about parenting a hypothetical future child.

I guess what I’m saying is B99 finally made me tear up. *And how narrow a lens we’re using to define family, since much like how polyamory solves at least 75% of love triangle plot lines, non-traditional familial structures would fix so many sitcom adoption plot lines.

[theothermagicalcreatures-blog]

[rebelliousqueer]

So, when mainstream gays use the argument that "having gay and lesbian parents doesn't influence whether a child is gay or not," it always tends to be followed by children of queer parents saying "see, look at me; my parents were gay, and I'm straight as an arrow!"

Okay, that's great and all, but should arguments in favor of adoption by queers (which are problematic in many other ways, including the way they emphasize the nuclear family, as well as the problematic aspects of international adoption) really focus on how many cishet children queers can raise?  Do they think it would be acceptable for cishets to oppose queer adoption if it turned out that many children of queers did end up being queer themselves?