Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Grandparents

LGBT-Parent Families Abbie E. Goldberg • Katherine R. Allen Editors LGBT-Parent Families Innovations in Research and Implications for Practice Editors Abbie E. Goldberg Katherine R. Allen Department of Psychology Department of Human Development Clark University Virginia Polytechnic Institute Worcester , MA, USA and State University Blacksburg , VA , USA ISBN 978-1-4614-4555-5 ISBN 978-1-4614-4556-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-4556-2 Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London Library of Congress Control Number: 2012945937 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 This work is subject to copyright. 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Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Foreword LGBT-Parent Families: From Abnormal to Nearly Normative, and Ultimately Irrelevant In 2003, I began teaching an undergraduate course titled “Sexual Diversity in Society” in what proved to be a turning point year for North American strug- gles for LGBT family rights. Gay rights plaintiffs in the USA and Canada scored a series of landmark court victories that year. State and provincial Supreme Courts in Massachusetts, Ontario, and British Columbia became the fi rst in this hemisphere to judge bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and in its historic ruling in the Lawrence v. Texas case, the USA Supreme Court reversed itself by overturning antisodomy laws. A scathing dissent by Justice Scalia correctly forecast the implications of this decision for the ulti- mate legalization of same-sex marriage. I always begin my courses on sexual diversity by conducting an anony- mous, informal survey about my students’ sexual experiences, beliefs, atti- tudes, identities, and aspirations. Over the course of the past decade, I’ve noticed two intriguing, super fi cially contradictory, trends in the data produced by this decidedly unrepresentative sampling method. Unexpectedly, the number of women who label themselves lesbian has declined sharply, and the ranks of students claiming gay, or even straight, identities have been ebbing as well. Instead, students with nonconforming sexual or gender inclinations and practices, and women especially, have become more apt to describe themselves as “questioning, curious, undecided, or queer.” Some refuse to de fi ne their sexuality at all. This is not because my more recent cohorts of students are more fearful, reticent, or ashamed of their sexual desires than were their predecessors. They are not choosing to remain closeted due to internalized homophobia or a dread of social ostracism. On the contrary, like the public at large, my students express a steady rise in their acceptance of same-sex intimacy and in their level of support for same-sex marriage and parenthood. Indeed, virtually none of my students still considers heterosexuality to be prerequisite for forming families. Even those who proclaim the most dissident sexual and gender identities now seem to view their future entry into marriage and parenthood as social expectations that they variously embrace, defer, reject, or resist. No longer family outcasts, they are privileged members of the v vi Foreword “post-closet” generation who do not feel obliged to de fi ne themselves or their family aspirations in terms of sexual identities. The appearance of a handbook on LGBT-parent families similarly signals and advances the mainstreaming of a category of family that just a short time ago was utterly marginal, subversive, even illegal. As with same-sex marriage, what were once considered to be unacceptably queer forms of family have been moving rapidly from the realm of the clinically abnormal to that of the socially normative. Academic research has been intimately intertwined with the unexpectedly rapid normalization of at least lesbian- and gay-parent families. Court cases and legislative battles over bids for same-sex marriage, child custody rights, and access to foster care and adoption placements as well as to fertility and alternative reproductive services have relied heavily on the growing research literature on lesbian and gay parents and their children. Scholars working in this fi eld, including yours truly, have been called to tes- tify as experts in courtrooms and legislative hearings, and as public authori- ties and educators by the media and community institutions. Drawing on this mounting body of research, virtually all of the relevant major professional associations have weighed in, issuing a roster of reports and resolutions that af fi rm the effectiveness of lesbian and gay parents and formally support equal legal rights for them and their children. These include the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychiatric Association, American Psychological Association, Canadian Psychological Association, American Psychoanalytic Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, National Association of Social Workers, Child Welfare League of America, and the North American Council on Adoptable Children . The publication of this handbook, like the launching of the Journal of GLBT Family Studies by the late Jerry Bigner in 2005, signals a coming of age, so to speak, of a sub fi eld of research that gestated in the social move- ments for sexual and gender liberation and rights that generated its very subject matter. Both the journal and this substantial volume themselves serve as evidence of the astonishingly rapid growth, progress, and signi fi cance achieved by research in this fi eld. They demonstrate that a formerly periph- eral, somewhat suspect academic enterprise is now suf fi ciently mature and self-con fi dent to undertake its own benchmarking self-assessments. The impressively broad sweep of family forms, issues, and audiences addressed by this volume attests to this maturity. To date, the vast majority of research on LGBT-parent families actually treated only a narrow demo- graphic band of families with parents who adopted the “L” word. In response to the weighty political context and uses of this research, during the fi rst couple of decades, most researchers defensively compared lesbian-mother families to “normal” families with heterosexual parents, and their fi ndings typically stressed the similarities in child outcomes. The earliest studies compared the families of lesbian and straight mothers who were raising children after a divorce from a heterosexual marriage. More recent studies typically focus on planned lesbian-parent families created via the use of donor sperm or legal adoption. Consequently, this volume opens with a series of useful overview chapters on these paths to lesbian motherhood that undertake a comprehensive, critical inventory of this most developed body of research. Foreword vii However, Editors Abbie Goldberg and Katherine Allen know better than to sideline the families of the remaining constituents of the sexual minority alphabet. Ground-clearing, exploratory chapters included in this collection chart the more fl edgling bodies of research on families with G, B, and T spe- cies of parents. The volume also boldly pushes the research goal posts by including chapters on important underrecognized subjects, such as LGBT grandparenthood, polyparenting, and the politically sensitive matter of the appearance of a “second generation”—children raised by LGBT parents who themselves develop LGBT identities. Another sign of the maturity and con fi dence displayed by the editors and contributors to this handbook and by the sub fi eld more broadly is their self- conscious awareness of ethnocentric limitations evident in most of the research that has been conducted to date. With rare exceptions, the LGBT- parent families that have been studied have been disproportionately com- posed of White, middle-class North Americans and West Europeans. Goldberg and Allen made a commendable effort to rectify this imbalance by including

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