All the evidence is clear: same-sex or transgender parents in two-parent or single-parent families can be great parents, good parents, indifferent parents, or bad parents. Just like heterosexual parents. Whether they are attracted to men or women has nothing to do with it. This is why almost every national psychological and social work professional organization—including the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Social Workers, and the Child Welfare League of America—have publicly stated that there is no harm done to children by lesbian or gay male parents. (There are no statistics or professional statements yet on transgender parents, but the questions surrounding their parenting overlap with those of lesbian and gay male parents.)
Nevertheless, the myth that LGBT parents are somehow bad, or dangerous, for children remains deeply embedded in our culture. The primary reason has to do with the way our culture thinks about sexual identity. Both sides in this debate, those defending LGBT parenting and those attacking it, foreground the sexual identity of LGBT parents. One side says it does not matter; the other side insists it does, dangerously so. Either way, the debate never gets past sexual identity. This is a problem if we want to have a more complex conversation about the realities of LGBT parenting.
The power of this myth rests on the idea that parent is itself an identity and, for many people, an all-encompassing one. But parent is not an identity. It names a social relation between a child and his or her caretaker. In some similar ways, sexual identity is only one aspect of sexuality. When we focus on whether a certain identity— such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or straight—is more acceptable and less harmful than another, we miss the point. It is not identity, but rather the complications of lived experience and lived relationships that affect people’s lives. When parenting is at question, those interpersonal complications can indeed harm children, no matter the “identity” of the parent or parents.
The idea that sexual identity is a predominant problem in parenting shapes arguments against same-sex marriage, LGBT people adopting children or becoming foster parents, and LGBT people teaching in primary and secondary schools. State-sanctioned, organized hostility to LGBT families has been particularly strong since the 1950s, when lesbians and gay men began forming political groups to fight for equality under the law. Lesbians were (and still are) more likely than gay men to have families that include children. This is because women often came out after they had been married and were frequently denied, or had to fight for, custody of the children from their marriage. For these families, and for the growing lesbian movement more broadly, questions of lesbian parenting became a matter of great importance. In 1956, the San Francisco–based Daughters of Bilitis sponsored discussions titled “Raising Children in a Deviant Relationship.” They quickly questioned the word “deviant” by placing it in quotes when they later reported on the event in their magazine, the Ladder. For its two decades of publication, the Ladder was filled with stories of lesbians dealing with the legal system as they tried to keep their children.1
This discrimination has continued far after the LGBT rights movement gained substantial ground on many other issues. In 1985, Massachusetts, a relatively liberal state, reacted to complaints that a gay couple, Don Babets and David Jean, were raising two foster children by revising the state foster care policy to exclude homosexual parents. The change was spearheaded by liberal Democratic governor, and presidential hopeful, Michael Dukakis. Thanks to a four-year court battle waged by Boston-based Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the policy was eventually overturned.
In 1993, a Virginia court took Sharon Bottoms’s son away from her and granted custody to her homophobic mother, who had claimed that Bottoms’s open lesbianism was a danger to the child. The court ruled that since Bottoms “admitted in this court that she is living in an active homosexual relationship,” and since homosexual acts were illegal in Virginia at the time, her “conduct [was] illegal and immoral and renders her unfit to parent.”2 Shockingly, the judge granted custody to Bottoms’s mother, despite the fact that Sharon Bottoms had claimed in court that her mother’s live-in boyfriend had sexually abused her twice a week when she was a teenager. Sharon Bottoms won on appeal, but lost her child again when her mother re-appealed the case.
In each of these cases—Don Babets and David Jean in “liberal” Massachusetts, Sharon Bottoms in “conservative” Virginia—lesbian and gay parents were not assessed for the quality of their parenting care nor how they related to their children. They were judged, and found lacking, on the basis of pernicious stereotypes about homosexuality. A primary example of this is the idea that many LGBT people are child molesters or pedophiles. While this idea is most often associated with gay men, it is also used against lesbians, as well as bisexual and transgender people. The labeling of LGBT people, particularly gay men, as child molesters had its first fever pitch in the 1930s, when J. Edgar Hoover penned a series of newspaper op-ed pieces warning Americans about the new danger to the American child and the American family—the “sexual psychopath” or the “sex criminal.” While never explicitly mentioning homosexuality, Hoover’s coded subtext made it clear that this new, lurking “monster” was the single adult male who was sexually driven to molest children and thus gay (see myth 4, “Sexual Abuse Causes Homosexuality”).3
Hoover’s paranoiac scenario emerged from very concrete historical precedents. Since the Middle Ages, groups of people who were considered outsiders by mainstream society were often accused of harming children. This accusation served to demonize and criminalize outsiders. Jews, for instance, were accused of murdering, and sometimes sexually abusing, Christian infants and children in religious rituals. This primal anti-Semitic myth was also used by the Third Reich against European Jews during the Holocaust. In sixteenth-century Japan, European Jesuit missionaries were accused of molesting children. Chinese male immigrants in nineteenth-century California were accused of sexually assaulting young white girls.
Worry over the corruptibility of children has exaggerated and reinforced the idea of childhood innocence and, in particular, childhood itself as utterly innocent of sexuality and sexual knowledge (see myth 16, “There’s No Such Thing as a Gay or Trans Child”). Beneath the myth that LGBT parents are bad for children lies the fear that exposure to the wrong sorts of sexual identity ruins any child’s supposed innocence. This fear keeps the focus on categorizing the right or wrong kinds of parents rather than on the relations between children and parents.
In the 1920s, LGBT people were becoming increasingly visible in US popular culture. They became identified as a clearly defined group, and groups don’t raise children; they aren’t families. Ironically, this group identity emerged from the fact that they had been stigmatized. Yet this stigmatization became the reason to view them as an ever-increasing threat. The demonization of LGBT people as bad for children is a continuation of a clear historical pattern of demonizing an entire group by accusing it of child predation.
To a large degree, the monstrous homosexual pervert is at the heart of the myth that LGBT parents are bad for children, maybe especially, their own. Most heterosexual Americans would probably agree that the notion that LGBT parents are active child molesters is patently absurd. They also would not want to see themselves as prejudiced against LGBT people. Nonetheless, a significant percentage of Americans—29 percent, according to a 2009 Gallup poll—still believe lesbian and gay men should not be elementary school teachers. Prejudice and discrimination are far more often expressed not in the form of the big, obviously egregious lies, but in tamer, more nuanced, less obviously discriminatory ones. Often, these more socially acceptable prejudices are not even understood by the people who hold them as exhibiting prejudice. They experience their views and themselves as reasonable or tolerant.
In contemporary society, these socially acceptable prejudices are often cloaked in vague, unproven, pseudoscientific psychological and sociological language and arguments. Experts speak about the “less than ideal” conditions for raising children, or introduce innuendos about “the child’s best interests.”
This myth’s power also emerges from the argument that children are the natural, biological result of the sexual activity between a man and a woman. Because pregnancy cannot result from the sexual union of two women or two men, it is therefore unnatural for nonheterosexual people to have or raise children. This biological argument makes no sense. It presumes that women and men have sex primarily for the sake of reproduction and not pleasure. It ignores the reality that pregnancy resulting from heterosexual sex is often completely unintended, with neither parent wanting the child. It ignores the science and technology that make pregnancy possible through nontraditional means such as alternative insemination, in-vitro fertilization, egg transplants, and embryo transfers. While lesbians, gay men, and transgender people may use some of these technologies to have children, they are overwhelmingly used by heterosexuals.
The argument also discounts the fact that single people and couples, both heterosexual and homosexual, form families through adoption and surrogacy. If female-male sexual intercourse is the only biologically and morally natural method for creating children, then two conclusions follow. First, heterosexuals who require the assistance of reproductive technologies in order to conceive a child are unnatural parents. Second, those heterosexuals who do conceive children “naturally” through male-female intercourse are biologically destined to be good parents. We know neither of these is the case. Good parenting is a form of care based in an ongoing social tie; it is not a biological given.
Promoting the reproductive heterosexual couple as the gold standard for making families furthers the argument that children need two parents of the “opposite sex,” a mother and father, so that they will grow up to be gender-appropriate, heterosexual adults. One popular psychological and sociological argument against gay men and lesbians parenting is that children are harmed because they are not provided with “correct” gender or sexual role models. This places the children at risk by making it difficult for them to develop stable, heterosexual, and gender-typical identities. The argument that children of gay or lesbian parents are more likely to become gay, or to have disturbed gender identities, is used in child-custody and same-sex-marriage cases. There is no evidence that children of gay or lesbian parents are more likely to be gay. But even if it were true, why would this be a problem if you believe there is nothing wrong with growing up to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?4
Studies aside, common sense tells us that the same-sex or different-sex attractions of parents have little to do with those attractions in their children. Almost all LGBT people were born to heterosexual parents. The fear that children of same-sex parents are deprived because their parents are of the same gender—thus denying them the shaping influence of a parent of the “opposite sex”—is, on the face of it, absurd. Children have so many influences in their lives—extended family, families of friends, schools, the media—that the idea they have no exposure to “opposite sex” role models is simply untrue.
All these arguments against LGBT parents are facile, false, and beside the point. The reality is that LGBT adults have for many years created families that are dynamic and highly functional. The 2010 census concluded that about 25 percent of self-identified lesbian or gay households were raising children. Lesbians and gay men have done this despite receiving little to no social support outside of their communities and despite being penalized by the American judicial and legislative systems, as well as by public and private social service agencies.
Overwhelmingly, peer-reviewed studies show that children in single- or two-parent lesbian or gay households grow up no different from children in similar single- or two-parent heterosexual households. For example, twenty-one peer-reviewed psychological studies of lesbian-headed families, published between 1981 and 1998, all found the difference between lesbian parenting and heterosexual parenting negligible.
In 2002, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that:
A growing body of scientific literature demonstrates that children who grow up with 1 or 2 gay and/or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do children whose parents are heterosexual. Children’s optimal development seems to be influenced more by the nature of the relationships and interactions within the family unit than by the particular structural form it takes.
These studies are important not only because they debunk the myth that LGBT parents are harmful to children. They also offer the basis for legal arguments that can lead to changes that may be helpful for LGBT families. In 2004, the American Psychiatric Association formally opposed all “legislation proposed at the federal and state levels that would amend the US Constitution or state constitutions, respectively, to prohibit marriage between same-sex couples.” There are many other instances—such as issues of adoption, custody, and access to fertility technology and social services—in which these studies may help establish legal and policy precedent that will help same-sex couples create, and sustain, families.
The lived expertise on this question is not found in psychology departments and research centers. Religious and social conservatives who make the argument that gay parents harm their children never ask the real experts on this topic: the children of lesbian and gay parents. In the past decade, children raised in LGBT households have been organizing on their own behalf. COLAGE: People with a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, or Queer Parent, is a national group whose members speak out about their experience and support other LGBT families. As a result, the children of LGBT parents are being heard more frequently. Zach Wahls, author of My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family, spoke to great applause at the 2012 Democratic National Convention as he supported marriage equality.
The often bitter debate that swirls around LGBT families cloaks the larger discussion: how do we all create a culture that nurtures all children, in all kinds of families, to grow into happy, loving, successful adults? It would be as foolish to argue that LGBT parents are all great parents as it would be to argue that they are intrinsically bad parents. We live in a society that, in many ways, does not respect children as full human beings and treats them as helpless for far longer than is realistic. As a result, our society places enormous, unreasonable expectations on parents. Until we create new ways for parents and children to live healthily together, neither will grow and thrive, especially as families.