I'm a lesbian mother of 1, and I was wondering how other queer parents started their families.

Hello there! I am contacting you regarding a PhD thesis conducted by doctoral candidate Alessio Gubello, under the supervision of Professor Salvatore D’Amore at the Research Centre on Development, Family and Human Systems (DéFaSy-ULB).

We are currently conducting research focused on families with at least one LGBTQIA+ parent and their adolescents or young adults (10-25 years old) 🌈.

Our goal? To better understand the experiences of LGBTQIA+ parents in these challenging times, their parenting practices, and to explore potential links with the well-being of young people. In short, we aim to give visibility to realities that are still too rarely documented in an increasingly worrying sociopolitical context 📚.

Participation is simple: an anonymous and confidential online questionnaire 🔒, to be completed individually by parents and young people.

🌷Link to both versions of the questionnaire : https://linktr.ee/lgbtqia.families.studies.ulb

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https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61586606084199

https://www.instagram.com/lgbtqia.families.studies.ulb/

We remain, of course, available for any further questions or additional information regarding the project. Alessio, the study coordinator, is copied on this email.

Thank you for your consideration. 💛

I am currently 10wks pregnant with our first baby. My wife and I are starting to tell more friends/family and I could use advice on how to correct these conversations. I'll preface by saying none of these people mean it maliciously but for example, I just had a family member ask to "see what the dad looks like". We used an anonymous donor from a sperm bank and have already made the decision not to show any pictures of him. That was how I responded but then I very quickly regretted not immediately correcting the fact that there is no dad. It's a sperm donor. I felt myself get very defensive the more I thought about it but I also know they don't mean it in a disrespectful way.

I know this won't be the only time something like this comes up so how do you approach these conversations?

It would be nice to be able to speak with someone (even if they're adults now in their 20s or 30s or beyond!) who were raised by two dads. I've never met anyone in real life... and it'd be nice to have that experience of just being able to hear from and speak with someone who can say what it was like for them.

Does anyone know anyone who'd be comfortable chatting? Can be online

Hopefully this is okay to post here! I (25 FTM/NB) and my husband (36M) have a 2 year old son together. To provide some context, my husband is a cis man and I'm transmasc and have been since I was a teenager. Our child is biologically ours, and we live in the USA in a southern red state at the moment, so for our safety and comfort during the pregnancy and as new parents, I became a lot more fem-presenting (grew out my hair, wore feminine maternity wear for lack of better options, etc). We also talked a lot during the pregnancy on what we wanted to be called, and after spinning around some alternative titles, decided to just go with my husband as "dad" and myself as "mom" because if we have to stay here long enough for him to start school, we don't want him to be bullied or ostracized in a very conservative space for having 2 dads.

Here's the kicker: I was fine with it for a while... but now, 2 years later, I'm fully masc-presenting and (mostly) passing again, and it's becoming harder and harder not to cringe and feel dysphoric when my kid calls me "mama," particularly in public. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that it's too late to change it, and if we did change it, I'm not sure what we should change it to. Additionally, currently, we're living with my unsupportive parents (who choose to believe I'm "detransitioned" and a "woman" in a hetero marriage, and they call me "mama" to my son as well. Our goal is to move up to a very liberal area in the PNW next year, but we're not sure if/when that's going to happen.

I'd love to get some input, if anyone has been in a similar situation, or has any thoughts? I don't want to lose myself or invalidate my identity, but I don't want to confuse or upset my kiddo either, or make his life harder.

TL;DR: We're an cis4trans MLM couple, but I'm "mama" and my husband is "daddy." I'm not sure I can keep being OK with being "mama," but I don't know what I'd change it to, and don't want to negatively impact my kid by changing it. Seeking thoughts/advice on the situation.

how many of yall are actively involved with sibling groups?

my wife and i are not currently active in any of the groups just bc our kids are young, it sounds like another thing to keep up with, and tbh im sure I’ll get hate for this but…we aren’t overly interested in seeing tons of pictures and sharing a ton of info about our kids to strangers.

to be clear our kids know where they come from, know their genetics have pics of their donor, when they are old enough to understand we will explain they have diblings out there and of course offer to connect them if they want.

our (lesbians with donor conceived kids) friends say we are damaging our kids sibling relationships by not joining these groups, sharing pictures and developmental milestones, and trying to do yearly trips with these people.

we are not by any means trying to damage our kids futures and again are incredibly open to whatever our kids want to do on the future….but they are 1 and 4….

are we the assholes lol? our friends have let us know that yes we are and it’s actually caused a huge strain on our friendship. my aunt is a lesbian in her 60s and my cousins are donor conceived and i asked them about it and they seem to think our kids should choose to decide if they want a relationship with them when they are older which we agree with. but several of our millenial lesbian parent friends really are horrified. is it just our friend group? are we the assholes? how common is it to be taking yearly trips with your kids diblings?

Hey gay fam. I'm struggling and I don't know what to do. My wife (36F) and I (37F/NB) have a 2 year old daughter my wife carried, and ten month old fraternal twin boys who I carried. She has been a SAHM since our daughter was born, so has had some of the worst days by herself while I've been at work (I have come home early countless times when she calls for help, fortunately my management is very understanding.) I'm currently toward the end of some deferred bonding leave and, if I didn't do ten years in the US Navy, this would be the worst time of my life. I love them all so much, and my wife and I are barely holding it all together, I can feel the seams popping on our relationship (we met in 2016, married in 2017, I got out of the Navy in 2018, and we had our daughter in 2024, so we've been together 10 years) we had our issues, but we have never fought as much as we do now. The parents of multiples subreddit has a general rule of thumb that you don't do major changes in the first year of the baby/ies' lives and I can't tell you how much I do not want a divorce. That said, I believe our communication is broken and I have asked her so many times to go to couple's therapy with me, but she flat out refuses every time. She has told me that I have the worst communication, so I need to fix it myself with my therapist, and she's also told me that I only want couple's therapy with her because it's "the easy way out" of our communication issues. I don't know what to do. My therapy has basically been keeping me alive through pregnancy and postpartum just with managing all the changes with myself and the kids and trying to get my footing in a new normal. We do usually have my parents to take the kids for a day and the boys for a night most weeks, and her dad and stepmom take them for a day maybe every two weeks on average. All mentioned parents are retired. I'm not sure if I'm looking for advice or just trying to talk about this to someone who isn't my therapist.

ETA: Sorry, it's been a particularly rough day, so I haven't been back much, but I have been reading and realized I did not mention that both of us have been in individual therapy for several years. I started near the end of my time in the Navy and she had been to therapy a few times in her life, but we have both consistent with our current (separate) therapists for over five years. We each have our own traumas and things to work out internally so we can keep becoming better humans and hopefully cut down as much as much generational trauma as we can.

So, our oldest daughter is 10 years old. She recently started middle school in the European country where we live. We live in a small, close-knit local community, and, for the most part, the school that our kids attend is good.

However, recently, my daughter has been complaining that her classmates – especially the boys, it seems – increasingly use homophobic and other bigoted slurs when talking to each other. Things like calling each other faggots and saying "that's so gay!" in a condescending way, or using terms for being disabled as a negative.

My daughter is quite smart and is well aware that these slurs refer to people like her moms and families like her own. The fact that my wife has a vision impairment (being almost blind) does not help the situation with her peers using disability terms in a degrading way.

So far, we've told our daughter to ignore the slurs, telling her that, more than anything, this nonsense really speaks to her classmates' ignorance. But it doesn't do much to solve the issue.

Do you guys have any good ideas or perspectives on how to handle this issue?

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Hi my 9 year old son is making me more and more worried. For context iv always worked in the same school as him and this has never been a problem, he’s super brainy, does all his work and never gets in trouble. The past 2 years iv noticed he’s started to get a bit paranoid he’s constantly upset thinking he’s either going to get into trouble or he’s done something that he’s then shameful for (his words not mine). He doesn’t have many close friends but always plays/joins in at break/lunch times and he’s quirky and not a typical boy so I never really worried about that. He also gets upset a lot that no one in his class has the same interests such as games like Undertale. I have worked with kids for nearly over 10 years but I’m now at a total lost as I don’t feel like other kids have these strong feelings like my son does. Is there something I should be looking out for?

My mom is wanting to gift my wife and I a book/journal/memory book that’s tracks the 9 months of pregnancy and the 1 year of life milestones. Does anyone have any recommendations? I’ve been looking around, but a lot of books mention the “father” or “dad” and my wife and I are lesbians. So any recs that avoid using dad or father is awesome. Thanks!

ISO advice or input if you’ve experienced something similar—

First, some context: I’ve (40F) been married almost six years and my daughter was five when I married my wife (46F).

Prior to meeting my wife, it was just me and my daughter (she was a product of sexual assault).

Admittedly, me and my wife’s relationship moved fast (because, lesbians🙃), and a lot of changes (moving homes, wife getting pregnant with son and giving birth to him shortly after our wedding, COVID, etc.) occurred subsequently; which in retrospect, I am sure was very challenging for my daughter and I regret not putting more thought into how this would impact her.

All that said, for at least the past three years, my daughter has been completely hostile to and unaccepting of my wife. My wife spent the majority of that time either being neutral to how my daughter treated her, or going out of her way to try to please and bond with my daughter. Any efforts of bonding were largely unwelcome by my daughter, though, and my wife most assuredly has given up.

They clash A LOT now, and my wife understandably has lost her tolerance for how my daughter treats her (for example, she tells my wife she “hates” her and “wishes she would die”[… I do stick up for my wife when this happens]🥺).

I clearly feel in the middle and am often hopeless about things improving at all. Obviously, this creates a lot of tension and less cohesion in our family and as a “bandaid” to the situation, I am often spending time with my daughter and my wife is often spending time with our son…we only sometimes do things together, the four of us.

A couple answers to common questions:
-My wife carried our son (6) via IUI. When we met, she was adamant about carrying her own child and had ended her first marriage bc her ex changed her mind about wanting kids, and due to her age, she opted to not interrupt her timeline despite us having recently met.

-The first couple years when my wife and daughter were getting to know each other, I would say for the most part, my daughter tolerated my wife, and for some unknown reason (maybe brother’s arrival?), it just got progressively worse…

-Daughter does not know about her conception story and she does have therapy (has had it since she was five).

Tips? Suggestions? Commiserating? TIA.

My wife and I are expecting our first baby next year. We’re in need of a family lawyer for second parent adoption. We’re located in Berkeley County, WV. Does anyone have lawyer recommendations?

My husband and I have twin toddlers. We live in a very urban and very liberal bubble, so some things aren’t a problem…

But the well meaning middle aged people who fawn over our family are weird. Like I’m getting groceries and you stop me to tell me how wonderful I am and how beautiful my family is. I feel weird because I am not beautiful. My children are fighting about something asinine like who gets to hold my hand. I have two f$&*ing hands and two children they should be able to share.

But I’m an amazing parent. My family is lovely and everyone loves us here. Girl, I’m here because it’s an Aldi and unless another store has a loss leader it’s usually cheaper.

I don’t know, it seems like a stupid problem but I’m so tired of being condescended to. I want to shop with my family in peace.

(F 27) In an LTR with my partner (also F 27), I'm intentionally working to become the best parent I can be for myself and the family I'm building - and looking for advice here!

It's a few years down the road between parenthood and myself and I'd like to spend the time I have really bolstering my knowledge and awareness before the process becomes the research project.

That said - I'm just looking for book reccomendations!

Any books that you read on the topic of parenting/family communication/navigating life as a queer parent that you'd reccomend?

I want to be able to raise grounded, mindful, conscious people. I want to continue to be a supportive partner through the IVF process and navigate that situation with care. I want to show up as the best version of myself, I find I do that best with a little help from people who've "been there, done that" – if you have, let me know!

My wife and I are having a baby and she's going to go by mom but I don't really resonate with momma or mom. I really want to go by dad but I don't know if im going to regret that decision in the future.

Any lesbian parents out there and one of them go by dad? Do you have any regrets about that decision?