“No Child Has Two Dads”

In the summer of 2026, a resident of Lima, Ohio took a picture of a billboard in her town and posted it on Facebook. The billboard reads: “No child has two dads. No child has two moms.” The words, “two dads” and “two moms” are rendered in the rainbow colors associated with gay pride. The ads were paid for by a Seattle organization called “Them Before Us.”

The message is obviously rooted in the idea that the only way to be a dad is to sire a child, and the only way to be a mom is to birth a child. It’s equally obvious that the people behind the campaign oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples, and gay parenthood generally. You could, of course, accurately counter that lots of kids have two moms or two dads, but it seems unlikely that the billboard’s intended purpose is persuasion or debate, so fatuous is the reasoning behind it. This is not to say that it lacks reason. Reason, after all, is most often used to justify existing beliefs.

“Them Before Us” purports to advocate for the needs of children–in contrast to “adult desires”–which establishes the dichotomy they apply to their public policy positions. In particular, they claim to defend children’s “right to their mother and father,” by which they mean the biological mother and father. The list of things they oppose includes surrogacy, donor gametes, no-fault divorce, legal recognition of same-sex marriages, and other things that diverge from their ideal of “one man and one woman producing biological offspring and remaining together for life.” Any deviation from this family structure is considered inferior, because that’s how ideals work: you can never add anything to them; you can only ever take something away.

I don’t have to guess about how they would judge a single gay dad raising a trans kid.

My (now ex) husband and I had a two-month pregnancy. We found out in September that we had been chosen as the adoptive parents of a baby due in November. We were both at work, and our case worker conferenced us in to deliver the news. I cried.

In the year leading up to that call, we had gone through the motions to become a licensed foster home. We attended workshops on the foster-to-adopt process. We had to learn and talk about studies and testimonies on the adoption experience, including things like international and trans-racial adoptions. The agency brought in various speakers to share stories of how things can go wrong, both for adoptive families and for the children in the system. We learned that most kids in the foster-to-adopt program benefit from an “open” adoption arrangement, meaning one where they have ongoing contact and visitation with their biological parents. Decades of longitudinal studies show that when kids grow up without any access to their families of origin, they tend to make up their own stories about them. Being able to ground those stories in real experience helps adopted kids develop a sense of belonging in the world. Notable exceptions to open adoptions are cases where biological family are legally barred from any contact with their children.

A judge can issue a no-contact order and force a termination of parental rights. We heard testimony of terrible abuse and neglect: parents who starve their children in favor of drug money, or who rape their children, or prostitute them. Sometimes these kids have extended family who can love and protect them, and sometimes they don’t. The courts tend to privilege keeping kids with biological family if doing so can be reasonably safe. Case workers in the foster system might provide prospective families with a “risk level” for any placement, meaning the risk of a child being removed from an adoptive family’s custody somewhere down the line. Different adoptive parents have different levels of tolerance for risk.

At one workshop, a gay couple shared the story of how their daughter of 18 months had been taken away from them. They had been raising her from infancy, and she had become a member of their family. A woman who had prior, temporary custody of the infant found out that the baby had been placed with a family headed by two men, and she objected. She was not the biological mother; she was another foster parent. She was a ‘professional’ foster mom who hosted many children; took them in, cared for them, and saw them on their way to their “forever homes.” But this forever home didn’t sit right with her because of her anti-gay sentiments, and she was also a friend of the Lieutenant Governor of Oregon. Because of her connections she was able to draw the family into a lengthy court battle. When she prevailed, she created a media circus, where the gay couple was forced to hand over their crying (now two-year-old) daughter on the courthouse steps in front of TV cameras, followed by the Lt. Governor’s prepared remarks. This was motivated by “deeply held religious beliefs,” according to one version of events.

About a year into our relationship with the agency, the ink was barely dry on our foster home license when we got a call from our case worker. Two kids, siblings, two and four, were in police custody. Their biological father had left them in the care of their grandparents, who were legally barred from being caretakers for the kids. The bio-mom, a heroin addict, was in jail, and the dad was missing. We could be parents in 20 minutes; the cops could swing by the house and drop off the kids. This was all the information we had. Our case worker said that she would categorize this as a “high risk” situation. She listened for clues about our thoughts. Silence. We were speculating about the unspoken parts of this story, and still thinking about the gay couple who were forced to give up their daughter. The scenario didn’t match the ones we had imagined together by any stretch.

“Guys,” she said after a pause, “don’t say ‘yes’ unless you can really mean ‘yes.’” She said that even if these kids got taken away from us and reunited with their family, we had to be ready to be their “forever home” if that’s the way the case played out, and if it went another way, we’d have to be ready to relinquish the kids some unspecified amount of time later.

We said no.

In the process of becoming a licensed foster home, we had to think critically about the scenarios we would accommodate, because the agency asks you on a form. Would you be willing to adopt a boy? A girl? What age range? Would you be willing to adopt a child with a disability? Which disabilities? What about a profound disability? Would you be willing to adopt a child who has been abused? Molested? Would you be willing to adopt a child who has abused animals? How about other children? Acts out sexually? Would you be willing to adopt a child who sets fires? One who has set fire to pets? It’s a long and at times disturbingly specific form. We talked at length about our “happy path” as well as the less-desired options that we would gladly embrace. Our primary wishes were, perhaps embarrassingly, common. Like most adoptive parents, we hoped for an infant. We weren’t looking to be saviors. We just wanted to be parents.

Some placements demand more than others. It’s hard enough to be a good parent under the best of circumstances. When you are trying to build a family through a deliberative and intentional process like adoption, that’s a good time to know your limitations rather than to test them. Our “happy path” was to adopt what the agency called a “directly relinquished infant,” meaning one who was intended for adoption at the time of birth. They would broker an arrangement with one of the pregnant mothers they were working with. The agency warned us that this arrangement was one of the most desired and therefore most ‘competitive’ in terms of others who were in the same pool: the birth mothers had a lot of families to choose from.

We got lucky. We submitted a storybook about our family with photos: who we are, where we work, what we do, etc. We included photos of us with our dogs, along with text about where we spend our vacation time, which holidays we celebrate, how long we’ve been together, etc. Such storybooks are presented to the mothers who intend to give their infants up for adoption. It was only a few weeks before we were chosen, twice in the same week! One of the moms ultimately decided to work with another family before we could meet her. The mother of our child was and is a lovely person: friendly, inquisitive, smart. She was also a teenager, not in love with the biological father, and not ready to be a responsible single parent. The biological dad was a bit of a loose cannon, also a teenager, recently enlisted for military service, and full of grandiose promises about the things he would do for the unborn child. We set about making plans for the birth and the custodial transition.

At home the nursery was already furnished and waiting. Sometimes we’d just stand in the room and imagine. My husband learned about the milk exchange where parents who can’t produce enough human breastmilk partner with mothers who are overproducing. Before our son was born we had a small stash of milk waiting in the upright freezer, with more coming each week.

It wasn’t long before we heard that mom was in labor.

We were on the way to the hospital when we got a call from our case worker: “don’t go just yet; the baby is born, and the mother is having second thoughts.” We instead went for sushi and cried into our miso soup. The baby was a couple weeks early and there had been complications during labor. The birth mother had an extra day in the hospital. We had originally been invited to attend the birth, but things took a turn, and the baby was spending this time with the biological family.

I can’t tell you what the mom was going through, but after a day or so, she decided that her original plan was a wise choice. She couldn’t bear to hand the baby to us directly, as she had planned to do. Instead, we would be led to the back halls of the hospital, and the baby would be brought to us by a nurse, who would demonstrate for us all the proper care protocols. Bottle feeding. Diaper changing. Stuff we already knew and had practiced, but this time it was for real.

You could tell this story in different ways. The way we told it was:

“When you were born, you were so wanted. Daddy and Papa had been wanting you for years, and Oma, too, and your grandpas. Your birth mom had planned to let us adopt you, but when she saw you for the first time, she wanted to keep you and raise you herself. You spent the first two days of your life with her and her family. Your bio-dad and his parents came to visit, too, and they gave us a blanket that he was wrapped in when he was born. Your mom eventually decided that her original plan for your life was a good choice, and she let us raise you, but it was a difficult choice for her to make. You were and are loved and wanted by so many people.”

It’s not a bad origin story. Our son has sometimes remarked that he feels lucky to have several doting grandparents, a mom, and three dads.

On the home page for “Them Before Us,” they’ve published a little graphic that compares bullet points between “when adults come first” vs. “when children come first.” For example, when adults come first, “children can be bought and sold,” whereas when children come first, “children belong to their biological mother and father.” I can’t help but notice that both bullets regard children as possessions. Tidy little ideologies like this never address realities. For example, children are bought and sold all the time, but never legally. Adoption is not a process through which children are bought or sold. That’s human trafficking, and it’s one of very few things that are illegal everywhere in the world, not that it doesn’t happen commonly.

Adoption can hardly be accused of putting adult needs ahead of children’s needs. The whole foster-to-adopt process, for example, is designed to subjugate adult wishes to the best interests of the child. Families have to go through months of trainings and certification to become a licensed foster home before they are allowed to care for any child. It’s true that adult wishes are part of the process, because adoptive families get to self-select for placements they are well equipped to handle. This has nothing to do with “who comes first.”

As for the matter of to whom a child belongs, I would suggest that ownership is not an ethical or moral relationship for humans to have to other humans. The deeper question is into whose care should a child be entrusted until they come of age and can speak for themselves? “The biological mother and father” is a simplistic and inadequate answer to that question, as demonstrated by biological parents who neglect or abuse their children, or by biological parents who care deeply about their child’s welfare and conclude that the child would be better entrusted to others. For whatever reasons.

“Them Before Us” would prefer that our son’s mother didn’t have the option to place her baby in a family headed by two men. They would categorize that as “when adults come first,” whereas when children come first, “gender balance (both mom and dad) is essential.” They also say that when adults come first, “family structure reflects adult preferences,” but when children come first, “family structure conforms to child rights.” They are, of course, talking about depriving people of rights they currently have, but in a way that removes the conversation to a level of abstraction where their aims might sound reasonable rather than fanatical: “you’re talking about adult desires, I’m talking about children’s rights.”

False dichotomies are handy rhetorical devices if you never have to apply them to actual circumstances. I don’t have to wonder what “Them Before Us” might say about a biological father who is a woman, or a biological mother who is a man. They’ve published a statement about transgender parents as part of their screed on same-sex parenting. I do not recommend reading it. Their “gender balance” concept is rooted in what Julia Serano termed “oppositional sexism,” which is the idea that male and female are opposite and mutually exclusive categories of being, with no overlapping qualities. It’s also rooted in “gender essentialism,” which is the idea that men and women each have a fixed “essence” determined by their biology: male or female.

“A lesbian can be an exceptional mother; she simply cannot be a father. A gay man can be a fantastic father; he simply cannot be a mother,” says their rant on same-sex parenting. From this posture they say they are not motivated by hate, but by concern for child welfare. They also cite the 2012 Regnerus study, bought and paid for by right wing zealots against marriage equality, some of whom have personal connections to the people behind “Them Before Us.” Katy Faust was mentored by the Witherspoon Institute’s co-founder, Robert George, who co-authored her “Them Before Us” book. It’s all a bit incestuous. The Regnerus study was deeply biased methodologically, both in terms of sampling as well as in its structure and definitions. This locates “Them Before Us” in the same moral universe as “Focus on the Family,” who also love and cite the Regnerus study.

Another thing “Them Before Us” and “Focus on the Family” have in common is that they are both on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate group map.

The week we brought our newborn home from the hospital, a big snowstorm hit Seattle. The photographic record from those first few days are punctuated by gutter-to-ground icicles in the background, a blanket of snow reflecting a bright cool light through any nearby windows, a frozen birdbath, and icy crystals on every tree and shrub. It was a magical experience I sometimes call a “timeless void.” I had coupled my paternity leave with a full year’s worth of vacation time, and my husband also took a bunch of time off. We had weeks to hole up inside with our baby and figure out what this new life might look like. A newborn infant, it turns out, is a relentless biomechanical clock of needs: eating, sleeping, and pooping, at semi-regular intervals, 24 hours a day.

We took our turns wearing the “baby lump,” the adorable, sweet-smelling infant curled up on our bellies. We learned what worked and what didn’t to soothe him to sleep. We clocked developmental milestones and grew eager to see the first social smiles. If you’ve never done this, you might not know that babies don’t smile for the first little while. You might capture a photo of something that resembles a smile, because their faces cycle through various contortions, but they don’t express any kind of joy until—usually—a few weeks on. Typically it happens around six weeks, if memory serves.

My mother was driving up from Portland at least once a week to stay with us and help out with the baby. From the first moment she held him, she knew what she’d be doing for the rest of her life. She was so in love, and loved being a grandmother. One late night I was having an especially difficult time soothing the baby. I would shush, and I would swaddle, and I’d rock, and I’d hum quietly, and I’d check for poop, check for hunger, and I’d bounce, and I’d do it all repeatedly. This went on and on, and my son wouldn’t stop crying. He could be like this sometimes, but mostly he was a relatively easy baby. This particular night, I was running out of patience, and my shushing became more aggressive, and my swaddling became rushed, and I’d rock, hum, bounce, rock, hum, bounce. I looked at this screaming baby and thought to myself, “don’t shake the baby; don’t shake the baby.” Three in the morning, and I lose it: “what the hell do you need?!” I practically shout. My mom was there in an instant to take him from me with a gentle, “let me try.” She soon had him calm, then sleeping. I felt like I had failed, but was relieved that someone else was there to take a turn. My feelings of frustration quickly dissolved to thoughts of self-recrimination. I hadn’t shaken the baby, but I’d thought about it.

Later in the year, it was Christmas Eve, and we were all taking turns doing variations of “cootchie coo” with the baby, who was in a reasonably stable mood. Suddenly, the baby cracks this purely, unmistakably joyous smile. My mother was standing over him, smiling and talking softly. “Hello, xxxxxx!” she sang.

On my son’s first birth certificate, the one from that first day at the hospital, his official name was “baby girl” with the surname of his birth mother. When a newborn is intended for adoption, it’s common to genericize the first name. Why they include the assigned gender as part of the name, I don’t know. That might be something to investigate, but another time. The birth mother was aware of the name we had chosen; I think the prescribed process was intended to reinforce that the name was ours to give. What is now his deadname appears on his second birth certificate, the one that lists us as the parents.

Some friends of ours, a Jewish family, offered to let us borrow from the tradition of a naming ceremony, which they organized and facilitated for us at our house. We hosted other friends and family for the event, which served as a lovely welcoming of the new child into our community.

We had earlier hosted a baby shower (organized by another close friend), which was more centered around people giving us baby things. Bottles and various nipple designs and flow rates; onesies, keepsake jewelry, teething toys, multisensory toys, rattles, bottle warmers, and blankets, so many blankets. Although we had told people, “gender neutral preferred,” we nevertheless got a metric shit tonne of heavily gendered things. We gratefully accepted and said ‘thank you’ for all gifts; we’re not dogmatic about it. Feminine-coded and masculine-coded items can be fine. There is always a question of taste.

Infant humans are androgynous. They just are. People dress them up in gendered clothing so that people can immediately gender them one way or the other. It changes the way people interact with the kid. Have you seen the onesie that looks like a little tux? It’s cute. Girl onesies often have a little ruffle that would be a skirt if it were longer, and bows, bows, bows, and butterflies, and strawberries. Also cute. Of course, people who have an ongoing relationship with a kid come to know them in a gendered way, regardless of attire. No one needs a gender reveal party with exploding pink or blue whatever to get gendered in this world. That just happens in a thousand ways large and small as we grow up.

My son walked for the first time at nine months. I got it on video, which I edited to Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the final, triumphant “dah – daaah” synchronized to the instant he lets go of the plastic play wall. From the moment he learned how to move, he was eager to get himself around. Loads of photos and videos document his desire to climb. In one video, I ask him: “are you being safe?” and he responds, “I don’t like to be safe; I like to be dangerous!” A few years later, photographing him climbing frighteningly high on a play structure, I asked, “do you feel safe up there?” and he responded, “yeah, but now I know how you’re feeling.” At one of the nearby parks, there’s an excellent climbing tree with a thick outer canopy and a wide-open interior filled with sturdy branches. We had a couple of visitations with the birth mom at that park, and she also got to gasp and marvel at his climbing prowess and daring.

Over the years our visitations with birth parents went from frequent to less-frequent. Eventually the mom fell in love and married, and had another child, a half-sibling to our son. We still see them sometimes, and probably always will. They are family, of a sort, in that we both have a familial claim to the same person. When our son was still very young, he had one visitation with his biological dad, who was on leave from the Marines. It was an emotionally distant visit in a public park. We didn’t hear from him after that for a long time. When we wrote to him during late elementary school, he denied paternity. We heard through the birth mom that his life had taken some dark turns following his discharge from the Marines, things that don’t need to be detailed here. It sounds like he’s still a bit chaotic. He’s made one awkward effort to reach out to us since then, and although we remain open to having a relationship with him, he doesn’t seem quite ready to follow through on a plan. That’s fine, too. Biological parents aren’t always paragons of virtue and stability. As the adoptive parents, our primary concern is with our child’s stability, as well as his potential vulnerability.

When our son was around Kindergarten age, my husband and I hosted a fundraising event at a local tavern for YouthCare, a Seattle outfit that provides services for local youth experiencing homelessness: housing, training, counseling, and such. I say “we” but my husband is the one who did all the planning. It was Christmastime, so we had a “wish tree” where YouthCare kids could write out something they wished for, and hang it on the tree as an ornament. People attending our event could choose to fulfil a wish, or just make a general donation. We also brought in a Santa to delight the kids by pulling quarters out of their ears. YouthCare and other service providers in King County estimate that about 40 percent of the kids who experience homelessness on the streets of Seattle self-identify as LGBTQ+, and among that population, about 70 percent were rejected by their families and forced from their homes.

“Kids with LGBT parents…face extraordinary pressure to endorse the political activism rooted in their parents’ sexual identities,” says “Them Before Us” on their same-sex parenting page.

While I find their framing odious, they’re basically talking about family values, the intergenerational transmission of culture from older generations to the young. This brand of ideologue, the virulently anti-gay fanatic cloaked in ostensibly Christian rhetoric, is usually fond of family values, just not mine. The demonstrated family values of the Christian right include rejecting their own queer or trans children and sending them out to live on the streets, or subjecting them to cruel ‘conversion therapies,’ or driving them to suicide.

It’s true that parents often hope to pass along their core values to their children. We transmit culture in the stories we tell, and how we tell them; in the relationships we nurture, and those we keep at a distance. We praise virtues like honesty, kindness, and curiosity, and discourage vices like lying, meanness, and dogmatism. We try to set examples in how we treat ourselves and others: we don’t treat friends as disposable; we don’t reject people because of their gender identity or expression, or because of their sexual orientation; we celebrate trans and queer people; we protect the vulnerable in whatever ways we can.

Earlier this year, my son and I participated in the Gender Justice League’s annual Trans Advocacy Day. It’s a well-organized event where hundreds of trans Washingtonians and those who love them gather in Olympia to lobby our state legislators on issues we care about deeply. We learned about the currently active bills, subdivided into legislative districts with a group leader, staged a brief demonstration on the steps of the state capitol (which was mostly a photo opportunity for visibility), then attended our appointments with the elected representatives and senators.

I don’t think my son was particularly inspired by any of it, but he was exposed to the legislative process in action. He was especially taken by a piece of legislation regarding blocking access for minors to certain kinds of online information. He was able to share his personal experiences of accessing information that helped him make sense of his developing gender identity, and he was able to articulate how any kind of content that’s relevant for gay and trans kids often gets sexualized and demonized by those who would deny access to it. He was worried about unintended consequences for gay and trans minors, especially, and he shared his concerns with the people who make laws. I felt so proud witnessing him speak for himself on a current issue he cared about.

For the demonstration, I had made a big foamcore sign that read “Protect Trans Youth” with the pink, blue, and white stripes of the trans pride flag. My son made a sign that was a bit cheekier: “Take My Tits, Not My Rights.”

In Washington State we’re about to vote on a couple of awful, cruel anti-trans initiatives this year, and as angry as it makes me to have to deal with this bullshit ad nauseum, and as fearful as I sometimes am for my son’s future, I am more often hopeful about the bright, capable, empathetic, and insightful young man he’s become.

I’m grateful for the many privileges I’ve enjoyed that made my family possible. Job stability and relative affluence go a long way toward satisfying the foundational needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. The divorce was the most painful ordeal I’ve ever endured, I’ll be honest, but I had the resources to shelter our son from the worst of it. In the long run, it was probably a healthier path than if we had stayed together. I had my mother’s considerable help in raising a child while she lived, but more than that, I had a loving mother, and my son had a devoted and ever-present grandmother. I belong to a large, caring, and connected multigenerational family with aunts, uncles, cousins, children of cousins, and their children. We have a community of family and friends who are like family. We are lucky, and we belong.

As to whether I’m doing a good job as a single gay dad raising a trans kid, I’m content to let my son judge that for himself. I suspect he’d at least give me a solid B.

“No Child Has Two Dads”

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