Are you there, Internet? It’s me, Nate.
I find myself returning to the blergosphere as an expectant father. Looking around online, it is probably not terribly surprising that the overwhelming majority of voices speaking on this subject are (and are addressing) heterosexual couples. However, that’s not the whole story. As a queer man with a partner who is a queer woman, I find that as helpful as much of the prevalent online information and community-building is, there are gaps through which a lot of our experience falls. I want to shore those gaps up, both for my own purely selfish reasons and because I think there are others like me, even if only a handful, for whom seeing this will be useful and interesting.
Moving onward:
My partner (S) and I identify as queer. We both used to use the term “bisexual” and have since abandoned it. I grappled with that for a while, and finally dumped the term because it reinforces gender binarism in a way I don’t like, and which does not accurately reflect my physical, mental or emotional attractions to others. But do a search on queer parenting, and you’ll almost exclusively find gay and lesbian couples adopting, conceiving with artificial insemination, and other permutations of same. Our situation is different, in that my partner is biologically female and I am biologically male. Genderwise, she and I are closer to the same somewhere-in-between gender than the traditional butch/femme dyad represented by the popular conception of an XX/XY couple. Still, at first blush it would be all too easy for us to disappear in the background noise of heteronormativity in the world of parenthood unless we speak up, and so that is exactly what we are doing. We are here, we are queer, and we are going to be parents. We aren’t married, and we aren’t getting married. But we will be doing our utmost to provide a safe, stable, loving home for our child. With luck, they’ll be as committed to building a better world as S and I are.
Maunderings, Digressions and Faint Chittering Noises 