“Queering Babies”: More Proof That Same-Sex Marriage Was a Very Bad Idea
A recently published journal article pulls the veil back on a gay man's experience with parenting ... and reveals some shocking realities.
The case for same-sex marriage was always the case for same-sex-parented children. One did not exist without the other. Same-sex-parented children are intentionally motherless or fatherless children — an immoral result by any historical or philosophical measure.
This is the logical certainty same-sex marriage advocates fought tooth and nail to paper over — until now.
A recent article in the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, “Queering Babies: (Auto)ethnographic Reflections from a Gay Parent Through Surrogacy,” lifts the veil on what the custodians of the genderless family revolution wanted all of us to ignore.
The author, a gender studies professor at the University of Amsterdam, trains queer theory on the youngest of children. In the introductory sentence of his abstract, he breathlessly objectifies the human child:
This essay focuses on the figure of the surrogate baby and explores how encounters with this figure disrupt or confirm normative expectations about the ‘babyness’ of babies, the ‘parentness’ of parents, and the interactions between these two.
For him, the child is a utility to advance a reconstructed and artificial anthropology around human origin and kinship. Buckle up. It’s gonna get bumpy here.
Dear Diary
This essay is exactly what the title promises: “(auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent” on his experience of raising a little girl with another man. Autoethnography is novel academic speak for personal, dear-diary reflections presented as intellectual investigation. However, this instance does provide a useful opportunity to hear a gay man speak unguardedly about the lived experience of this very young girl as she navigates her intentionally motherless pathway into life.
Our author starts by establishing himself, first and foremost, as the professional gender theorist that he is. So he launches with the theoretical:
Given their prenatal history, surrogate babies are queer creatures by default: their becoming and existence have to be negotiated through a set of institutionally defined normativities.
Do not bother yourself with the fact that this makes no sense. Just hear him out.
But can this queerness – whether imagined, experienced, or discursively produced – serve as a window to the queerness of all babies and how standards of normalcy are formed in the world they are born into?
He seems to certainly believe it can. But what is he really saying here in this curiously obscene statement? It is that the same-sex, degendered family — and the technological means by which such existentially barren couplings may produce children — are the procedural queering of the child and the very redefinition of the fundamental nature of parenthood and the family themselves.
This is not small thing; it is a huge admission. Colin Wright, the evolutionary biologist who runs Reality’s Last Stand, is correct when he says this article “stretches the boundaries of logic, coherence, and decency.”
But the personal informs the theoretical, and mightily so.
Engineering a Baby
The author starts his analysis with the birth of his “daughter.” (I put that important word in quotes, not as an editorial dig, but to simply note that he never actually makes the child’s actual kinship clear. They only thing he admits is that some eggs and a womb were contractually acquired by two men, which does not a family make. The author curiously admits that he and his partner have “a reluctance to call the surrogate ‘mother’ because of the lack of genetic ties.” Yet he directly asserts something that is impossible by the same logic: “we are both fathers.” The article is laden with similar inconsistencies on the nature of nature.)
The girl’s birth scene is a searingly painful telling. The author admits his own objectification without realizing it:
Sometimes I wonder if I see her as the most beautiful creature in the world just because I love her or also because of all the choices we made through IVF, from picking the perfect egg donor to finding the perfect uterus and beyond.
He confesses that “small imperfections even add to my fantasy of a technologically enhanced baby.” That small imperfection is that part of the girl’s earlobe is missing, significant enough that he “discovered this flaw the minute she was born.”
He creepily admits, “Sometimes I imagine that this spot is where the needle reached her at embryonic age to take a biopsy for genetic testing – a small price to pay for perfection.” It’s not his ear, after all.
Or maybe, he wonders if the missing lobe “is inherited from her ‘grandfather’ – the egg donor’s father” who “according to the genetic report, was born with an extra finger.” But our author then, in the next breath, actually describes this “ghostly, mythical grandfather” as “entirely fictional.” It is disconcerting to read, clearly his dissociative inability to come to terms with the reality of how biology creates children and kinship.
Great Expectations … of a Child
We must consider all this from the infant girl’s vantage point. She is, after all, the one whose “queering” we are contemplating. But it is clear the author has many adult-centric expectations and desires that this child has failed to meet.
She is called “Greta” in the article.
At her birth, the author explains he and his partner “were well-behaved and well-prepared almost-parents, and we had a well-thought-out plan.” This included their anticipation of immediate “skin-to-skin contact” with the newly arrived girl because “according to current fashion, it is the best thing you can do to establish rapport with a newborn.”
Yes, he completely missed the point that a mother is the central figure in this essential skin-to-skin exchange. Are we being too judgy in thinking this matters?
Greta tells us we are not.
The author admits, “The only problem was, however, that Greta was not well-behaved or well-prepared.” Why? Our author tells us: “She didn’t like doing skin-to-skin.” …with two men.
His explanation is where this gets obscene. Let us take it piece by piece.
Instinctively Searching
He complains,
She was clearly uncomfortable, if not pissed, and instead of letting me dissolve into the envisioned unity…
An appeal to our sympathy as his desirous expectations were crushed by the naturally primal actions of this newborn girl.
What actions? That Greta “impatiently moved towards where she expected to find my breast and suck on it.” Read that admission again, and soak it in.
Someone must have socialized that child in heteronormative bigotry in the womb. Clearly Greta was not keen on being “queered.”
The author laments, “There wasn’t much intimacy or innocence there; rather, everything felt somewhat animalistic and perverse, all about unfulfilled desire.”
His or hers? Our author is not clear. Poor Greta did not seem to enjoy nursing on a dry male nipple, and the author did not get the magic moment he had so hoped for. But we get an answer to whose desire was unfilled in the admission of Greta’s first annunciated word: nipple.
Not Natural
His next admission is just as stunning.
And for the first and the last time in our life with Greta, I could not escape from the thought that the situation we had gotten ourselves into with this baby project was just not natural (emphasis in original).
“This baby project”? Yes, that is precisely what the contractual purchase of multiple ovum and a nine-month Airbnb womb are not: natural.
The author then asks his reader to ignore the beginning of that previous “first and last time” line, because “this is not entirely true.” As we have seen, he actually wrestles with naturalness all the time. Why? Because sweet Greta keeps reminding him of it.
His language gets no less offensive as he admits that “the trope of lactation continues to haunt us.” Well, of course it does! Greta was saying something remarkably profound in her first “animalistic and perverse” actions. She was screaming, “I am not queer, and I will NOT be queered.”
That sustained conscientious objection is noted in the fact that “Greta has also begun to recognize the absence of a mother.” We are informed, “A few weeks ago she claimed that she wanted two mommies instead of us, because we suck at braiding her hair.”
Yes, gender stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Men, as “loving” as they might be, can never replace a child’s mother in the simplest of very important things.
Mommy Daddy
Motherhood is very important to Greta. We are told the toddler is “not particularly loyal to her toys,” but she has one which “she keeps carrying around and breastfeeding.” It is her baby doll. She puts the doll up under her shirt and just keeps it there “so her hands are free to do other things.”
It is as if Greta’s default play strategy ensures that no one else under her benevolent care will ever go without the necessity of a comforting, nourishing female breast. If only little Greta could fully appreciate the “freedom” of her own queering by these two men.
The author explains that while nipple was Greta’s first word, the name she assigned to him was “Mommy Daddy.” We are told, “[M]y husband is slightly annoyed at this development,” and rolls his eyes at it. They are sure it’s “Greta’s artful trick to normalize our relationship.” They comfort themselves by assuring each other: “This is probably just a phase – she’ll grow out of it.”
What he means is that eventually, things will surely default to “gay normal.” Why?
Because that is what the two men who worked so hard, and paid so much money to create, have long dreamed of. He refers to these unexpected natural behaviors of Greta as “irony.” Of course he does. He must in order to make it all fit his queer hermeneutic.
After all, his essay is an interrogation of “instances where societal norms disrupt potentially queer practices of parenting” and how these might possibly “provide a unique window to the queerness of all babies – and the queerness of the world they were born into…” (emphasis in original).
The only problem here is that Greta is showing very clear embodied resistance, and this gay man is confessing it to us through his autoethnography. He seems completely unaware that he is admitting to all of us some of the critical ways degendering the family has violated children.
Greta, and thousands of other children like her who were created by the radically counter-natural dream and mechanized procreation of same-sex families, are telling us that nature really does exist and will eventually crush the same-sex revolution.
Many have been making this same warning since genderless marriage was first seriously proposed in the 1990s. Now we are hearing the truth from the victims … through the very writings of their victimizers.
Glenn T. Stanton is the director of global family formation studies at Focus on the Family and the author of The Myth of the Dying Church.