LGBT Parents and Father's Day

Happy Father’s Day!!!! A special day it is indeed. For members of the LGBT Community it is a confusing day for everyone who is NOT a member of the LGBT Community. If you’re gay and you have your own children or maybe children that are now part of your family by marriage (yay) or commitment or both, you’ve already worked this out long before.  In the LGBT community there would SEEM to be lots of options or to look at another way, life damaging confusion for the children caught in this horrible, unholy, unpatriotic (why not?) alliance.

Actually when it comes to what you are to your children everything comes very binary. You can be two Dads or two Moms or you can assume one or the other role as Dad or Mom to a Mom or Dad. Still sound confusing? It’s not. Despite what some folks fear will be a desperate, overwhelming, life-long, disorientation for the children being raised by a same gender couple it JUST DOESN'T HAPPEN.

Statistics have shown it not to be so. I refer you to an articla from USA Today that cites many studies that show it is not damaging to the children in these situations it is actually life affirming.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-01-21-parentgender21_ST_N.htm  

Kids understand their relationship with each parent very quickly and on a profound life-long level. The only thing that can mess it up for kids is the same thing that can mess it up for any family. If there is no love then there are lots of challenges for the children and the parents. And it has been my experience that LGBT couples have been thoroughly tested on this love thing. They have found that love is their only constant and so they cling to it and then pass on that deep abiding love to their children. 

For me this parent dilemma has never been a question. I was their Father before I transitioned and they had the best Mother on earth back then. Nothing has changed. I’m still their Father and they still have the best Mother on earth. For some transsexed couples they may make other decisions. For unlike our gay brothers and sisters we have changed our GENDER and that means more opportunities to best show our love to our children. 

The confusion really comes from the BABY BOOMERS generation.  It’s been difficult to sort things out.  You weren’t supposed to be any of those LGBT possibilities. God does not make LGBT people and never has we were told as children.  In other columns that I have written, I have addressed this head on and will again in other columns. Here I will state the obvious conclusion about what God can or cannot do. God can do anything.  So God has made LGBT people just as long as God has been making people.  So let’s make that the given.

But that given was not given to us in my generation so many folks rejected all that they felt inside and suppressed those feelings and looked for love in a opposite sex person and were often forced to get married. Then if they had children the whole family would be caught in the middle of not a necessary loveless marriage but a tense and unresolved marriage. Parents caught in this situation would do their very best to not pass this conflict on to their offspring but so very often issues as deep as this simply could not be resolved by just getting through it and the marriage would disintegrate and the family would be in jeopardy as it always is in families of divorce.

For LGBT persons found in a marriage to an opposite sex person, acceptance is the only way out in my opinion. Then the healing can begin. Those persons who were once held in a bogus marriage can find someone they can really give themselves to completely. Real love between two adults is a powerful and influential witness to children. Two families can become one family but living in two households.  This is the most “propitious” arrangement that many divorced couples live with gay or straight.

Transgendered couples could find out they’re actually GAY. It happens!! I know one couple quite well who found this out to their equal astonishment.  In this situation you are a gay couple and you can scroll up this column and remind yourself how gay couples can really make that work.  

Transgendered couples could also find that you are not gay and then acceptance is the way to determining the outcome. Love must enter into this new passage and resentment and anger has to leave.  Resentments like the fact that we can’t be gay or transgendered and the longer we accept this madness we make a miserable situation nearly intolerable for all concerned.  We, Joy(my spouse) and I know something about this.

We were told by ministers, therapists, good friends that we as a couple were doomed.  But we knew we loved each other a lot.  We had been through many many challenges in our marriage and had always found the way forward was with each other. Once I began my transition, we took it day at a time which has always been our method and suddenly two months go by and we both notice that we were getting along better than we ever did.  That was eight years ago and this August 18th will be our 39th year as a married couple.  We’re still taking it a day at a time and always close a conversation by telling each other that we love each other.  Even when we text!!!

We do the same with our adult children.  We close a conversation with either one of them with an assurance that we love them. If we don’t say it directly we say it with a “Would you like French Toast in the morning?” or “Please be careful and calls us if you need us.” and sometimes we just come right out and say “We love you!” because we love or 20something kids just as much as we did we then they were first running to their first grade class.  Our reward and knowing it is getting through is what their Mom heard a little over a month ago on a Sunday from both of them, “Happy Mother’s Day!” And this morning I heard the nicest thing I could ever hope to hear, “Happy Father’s Day Dad."