So, what happens for nonbinary parents once their kids are here and fully realized? How do we navigate things like school, sports, activities, and you know, other parents? And how do we navigate gender identity journeys that may still be in progress, or fluid over the course of our lives as parents? We talk about queer and nonbinary parent visibility while getting involved in our kids’ lives, raising gender creative kids, anti-trans legislation looming in places like Florida and elsewhere, and doing the proactive work to make sure our families are seen and respected. This week we talk with guests Jess Venable-Novak, and again with Meghan Myron-Karels and Ash Dasuqi.
Podcast website: beyondthebinarypodcast.com
Follow us on Instagram: @beyondthebinary_podcast
Episode resources:
The Establishment: “How Queer and Trans Parents are Raising Revolutionary Children During the Trump Era.”
Xtra Magazine: “I’m a non-binary parent. There still isn’t space for me.” (andrea bennett): https://xtramagazine.com/love-sex/im-a-non-binary-parent-there-still-isnt-s pace-for-me-154990
LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal: “Parenting Beyond the Binary? An Empirical Test of Norm-Centered Stigma Theory and the Stigmatization of Nonbinary Parents.” (Meredith G. F. Worthen and Chancey Herbolsheimer): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/27703371.2022.2123422?journalCode=wgfs21
Washington Post (March 5, 2023): “Florida bills would ban gender studies, trangender pronouns, tenure perks.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/05/florida-bills-would-ban-gender-studies-transgender-pronouns-tenure-perks/
Rainbow Families Trans and Gender Diverse Parents Guide: https://www.transhealthsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Rainbow_Families_TGD_Parents-Guide.pdf
Other Podcasts:
Gender Reveal Podcast: Transgender Parenting “Starter Pack”: https://www.genderpodcast.com/starterpacks
Books:
Raising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting (Kyl Myers)
Like a Boy But Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary (by andrea bennett)
For the kids:
What are Your Words? (Katherine Locke)
Jamie is Jamie (Afsaneh Moradian)
Julian is a Mermaid (Jessica Love)
Episode Transcript:
MEGHAN MYRON-KARELS: So it’ll say… mother as the first one, father, but then it has like slash parent. And I’m like, wouldn’t it just be easier to be like parent one, parent two?
SUMNER MCRAE: Our birth episode got me thinking about all the paperwork that comes with having kids. Things kick off with the birth certificate. Most of which make you list the birthing parent as mother, even if the birthing parent is not a woman. Forms usually require the checking of boxes. A lot of yes or no answers. This or that, A or B. The other day, I’m filling out a form for some activity for one of my kids. And there’s a question asking the kid’s gender. There’s a bunch of options, including nonbinary, and one that just says, “I prefer not to say.” Then there’s space to enter your kid’s pronouns. I’m pleasantly surprised that whoever put this together included all of this until I start filling out the parent information section. There’s a dropdown menu with two options: Mother or father.
SUMNER MCRAE: Welcome to beyond the binary. A podcast about non binary folks navigating a binary world. Our first series of episodes center on parenting and the gender binary. I’m Sumner McRae, your host on this journey. I’m queer, non binary, and a parent. This is episode three: Kids.
SUMNER MCRAE: Being a parent outside of the gender binary can be a tricky business. Not because there’s anything inherently challenging about it – if anything, I think we’re better equipped than most to encourage self expression, exploration, and creativity, critical hallmarks of childhood and adolescence. But it’s challenging because, well, other people. A paper published last September, looking at the stigmatization of non binary parents, noted that, quote, because nonbinary parents violate the traditional heterocyst normative expectations about both motherhood and fatherhood, they can be perceived as unable to accomplish the many cisgendered tasks associated with being parents. Even cis people often don’t fit neatly into gendered categories, or resist the roles thrust on them due to gender. But while they may be working to rethink what it means to be a mom or a dad, they’re not necessarily looking to blow up those categories altogether. So what happens for nonbinary parents once their kids are here and fully realized? How do we navigate things like school, sports, activities, and you know, other parents? And how do we navigate gender identity journeys that may still be in progress or fluid over the course of our lives as parents?
JESS VENABLE-NOVAK: I feel like my journey as a parent has kind of run parallel to my journey with my gender identity.
SUMNER MCRAE: This is Jess venable Novak. They are trans, non binary, and the parent of two kids. Jess’s family is a queer, blended family, living in small town, rural Vermont.
JVN: And I just kind of realized that maybe I don’t identify as a cisgender queer person identify as a non binary person or a transgender person. So as I was settling into that identity, I was also kind of settling into what it means to be a step parent and a parent in general.
SM: Sometimes parenthood can clarify your feelings about your identity. And sometimes that identity can change, or evolve over time. And that’s okay.
JVN: I feel like especially becoming a parent to our second kiddo from birth, I feel like there was this pressure to have things figured out you know. It’s like, what is your kid going to call you and all of these questions that come externally, that kind of pushed my exploration of my gender identity even deeper in the last year or two? But at the same time, I think through talking with chosen family and my partner, it was also freeing to be like, it’s okay to not have a final answer.
SM: With my own kids, I found that giving them the language to explain how gender feels different for different people – that some people are men and others might be women and others are something else entirely – nonbinary, genderqueer, gender expansive, has made a lot of sense to them. They see me and lots of other adults around them who are gender nonconforming in their own ways. And they don’t really have a concept of what it means to be a stereotypical man or stereotypical woman. We’ve talked about pronouns in our house too, and how we can’t assume what pronouns anyone uses, just by looking at them. And also that pronouns can change. My kids know that I go by a different name than the one I was given at birth. They know that right now I sometimes use the pronouns she and her and other times use they and them. And they know that that can change.
JVN: Having our 9 year old has also been cool because as she has come to understand diversity in gender and what it means to explore your gender, she’s also had her own experience and has seen my experience and also likely experience of other people in her life, at least to me, it’s been really cool to talk with her about it and know that she’s getting this really big picture of what gender identity can be. I just feel like it’s so different from obviously from when I was a kid or just like older generations, right? And to know that our younger kiddos going to get kind of even more of that just because you know there are a few years younger and we’ll just meet more and more people that have more and more variety of identity.
SM: It also gives them the freedom to explore their own gender, play with their own names and pronouns and know that fluidity and change are part of the human experience. It’s all fair game, and it’s all beautiful.
SM: The act of parenting is so gendered that just holding a baby dramatically shifts how other people view you. One of the most jarring things that happened to me after becoming a parent was the shift from getting “sirred” to getting “mom’d.” People’s read of my gender changed, and along with it, their read of my queerness also changed. Not only did I get “mom’d” instead of “sirred,” but people would ask me about my husband and say things like, “the baby must look a lot like daddy!” To be consistently read as a straight woman was a bizarre experience for me, especially because I had changed nothing else about my demeanor or outward appearance, other than I now carried a baby around most of the time. To me, it seems like a lot of parenting as a trans or non binary person, and just queer parenting generally, is feeling both super conspicuous and also completely invisible at the same time.
MEGHAN MYRON-KARELS: And that’s the other thing too. I feel like folks from especially if they’re in an older generation, they were just raised to don’t talk about it.
SM: Here’s my friend Meghan Myron-Karels again. We heard a bit from her in the intro episode. She’s a music lover, a women’s soccer aficionado, and a queer parent to two adorable kids, one of whom occasionally uses the nickname mister mommy for her.
MMK: And so we’re just going to push through and operate under these other guidelines. And when they get into this area of grit, have you seen the movie, The Mitchells vs. the Machines?
SM: I’ve definitely seen it. The Mitchells vs. the Machines is a favorite in our house. In the movie, smartphones take over the world with the help of an army of robots, and the quirky Mitchell family has to try and stop them. One of the movie’s running jokes is the family’s unusual looking dog. Maybe some kind of weird pug mix. The robot foot soldiers interpret the world around them by scanning anything they encounter, and trying to determine what category it belongs in. Except the Mitchell family’s dog doesn’t fit into any of the robots pre-programmed categories. They can’t figure out what it is. Can’t think outside of their programming. And eventually, they malfunction, and their robot heads explode. Meghan sees this as a compelling metaphor for straight and cisgender people who just don’t see or can’t comprehend queerness or nonbinary folks.
MMK: It-it-it’s the robot. Dog pig loaf of bread. Where they just like… does not compute. And they just don’t know how to function.
SM: Queer invisibility also comes up for Megan’s family around race.
MMK: I am a multiracial. I’m South Asian and a blend of some European and my wife is white, but our kids are South Asian and white as well. What happens is whenever we’re in public, if it’s just me, nobody questions it like, I’ve never made the feel like I’m a nanny or I’m not their parent. But when we’re together as a whole family in public, my wife is very much treated like, oh, who are you in relationship to this other person and her kids? When biologically, I’m not related at all to my children. I didn’t carry them. They are solely genetically related to one another and my wife. It’s weird because I’m like, okay, when it’s my wife and I – because I will be “sirred” occasionally and my wife is more traditionally feminine. It’s common for us to be mistaken as a cisgendered heterosexual couple. It’s navigating this interesting dynamic of a queer relationship, a multiracial queer relationship, and a queer relationship where gender identity is also being challenged.
SM: Part of this is people’s inability to see queerness and register them as a queer family. For a lot of us, feeling like you both stick out and are also erased at the same time, comes from being put into spaces where there maybe isn’t a lot of queer or trans community built in.
JVN: It’s been kind of difficult.
SM: here’s Jess again.
JVN: In the sense that there’s just like there’s just less people where we live you know. Like the state of Vermont is like less than a million people live in the whole state.
SM: Jess says it’s really hard sometimes to be the only queer or trans parent that you know of at your kid’s school or in a small town. It means there’s no one to commiserate with. No one who has shared experiences that match yours.
JVN: It’s brought a lot of opportunities to educate folks, which is exciting sometimes. But it hasn’t made a lot of space for us to make a ton of community.
SM: It also means that you might not be seen or read the way you want to be read by other parents.
JVN: I always saw myself as being like a really involved parent helping out with theater sports and volunteering at the school and stuff like that. I kind of like went in hard like when she was in kindergarten. I was like ready to do all that stuff. And it was like pretty involved like. I was like the quote unquote room parents. It wasn’t necessarily like a negative experience, but it was just a little bit harder to connect with other parents or kind of like be seen the same way and in those moments I really felt kind of like the void of there not being other queer parents.
SM: It can add a layer of anxiety around playdates and social gatherings and feeling whole and part of a school community that straight and cis parents don’t have to navigate in the same way.
JVN: There are just those moments of like maybe not getting to be involved how I want to be because of how we’ll be accepted or not accepted. Our daughter who has turned out to be very much so not into sports at all did play tee ball and I was like really excited to help out and you know the first day it’s just these three dudes – dads who are like born and raised in the small town we lived in, and I was like yeah I’m not going to volunteer you know just because it would be… I knew it wouldn’t have been a good experience for like, me even if it would have been like okay in the eyes of my daughter. I think it would have been just like too stressful on our family. Am I going to be like seen or accepted or like respected in the way that I think I need to be for myself or like we want to be as a family? And then sometimes choosing to not be involved, which was not something I was expecting to have to do as a parent because I never really saw myself living in like a small rural community.
SM: Jess did say that as they’ve become more settled in their identity as a parent and their identity as a nonbinary person, they’ve been more willing to take part in things that in the past seemed too difficult.
JVN: And I think some of that is learning through those moments that I just shared with our daughter being like, gosh, I really wish I would have advocated for us as a family or like said yes instead of no looking back. And then I also think some of it is just like being more confident as an individual human trans person, parent. All of those things has made a big difference.
SM: So you know there’s people like a lot of people think that gender means like you could only be a boy or a girl.
CHILD: Yeah. And that’s not fair.
SM: Why is that not fair?
CHILD: There’s lots of genders and some people are just mean.
SM: Sometimes people just don’t know.
CHILD: Mm-hmm. People don’t know that the world is an awesome place.
SM: For a lot of non binary parents, a more expansive understanding of gender and wanting respect and the space to express ourselves is not just about us, but includes our kids too. Queer and transparent teach their kids about gender in unique ways. We tend not to enforce a lot of rigid gender roles and expectations. And I find that a lot of us end up having kids who identify as trans, non binary, or gender non conforming themselves. The right wing loves to accuse us of trying to make our kids queer, and to that I say, so what if we are? Straight people do it all the time. But I think it just illustrates that humans are naturally creative, curious, and fluid beings, and when given the space to do so, which so many kids of trans and queer parents are, they’ll explore that space fully. There are also a lot of queer and trans parents who are raising kids with a more specific gender expansive or gender creative approach. From the beginning, such as not sharing what gender was assigned to their child on their birth certificate and using exclusively they/them pronouns from birth. Essentially, gender creative parenting means not putting any traditionally gendered expectations on your kids and letting them take the lead on exploring their own self expression. Kimmins, who joined us for our birth episode, is taking this approach with their new baby. Jess and their partner are also doing this with their second child, who’s about a year old.
JVN: For me, it just kind of felt obvious. I think once I learned what gendered creative parenting is, it just like immediately felt right. I think it also felt right for my partner, although she had more of a do we feel good navigating the outside world doing that?
SM: Jess read a book called Raising Them by Kyl Myers, about Myers and her partner, who decided to raise their child without assigning a gender. The book Raising Them really helped Jess in thinking about gender creative child rearing. They were really excited about how positively people reacted to Myers family and this approach to parenting.
JVN: As a genderqueer person, I like have never encountered as much positivity as these people did introducing their gender creative baby to the world.
SM: But Jess notes that when Myers and her partner embarked on this journey, they both mainly identified as cisgender, and were perceived as a cisgender heterosexual couple. Jess wondered if their own decision to raise their kid as gender creative would be received differently, because Jess is non binary.
JVN: When my partner was pregnant and we were getting ready for them to be born. People were kind of like raised an eyebrow when we explained gender creative parenting and some people just kind of like outright asked, oh, is that because you use they them pronouns or is that because you’re trans and you want your kid to be trans? People were always congratulating that couple, right? They were like, that’s so cool. That’s a really awesome way to open up your kids world and whereas for us people were like, you’re just doing this because this is who you are.
SM: Some of their family and friends also needed a little help understanding what they were doing. Though they did find that the people closest to them, mostly tried to be supportive.
JVN: So we did some legwork and our parents and our siblings. We bought them the book so that they could tune into this specific story and we sent them links of different news articles and all of that good stuff.
SM: Similar to Kimmins and and their partner Jae from our last episode, Jess and their family sent out a birth announcement about their new baby for the sole purpose of making clear that they are doing gender creative parenting.
JVN: The front had their picture and the name and their weight and all of that stuff. And then the back was the letter to our community. We’re not assigning them a gender at birth. We’re going to be using they/them pronouns when referring to them. If you’re someone who’s aware of their reproductive anatomy, we just ask you to be respectful of our decision and not let that shadow how you refer to them.
SM: Jess and I and a lot of the other nonbinary and trans parents I’ve talked to found that this proactive work to establish what language we use to talk about our families and how we want others to address us isn’t limited to the months following a baby’s arrival. It becomes a thread that carries through to child care, school, sports, and more.
SM: A few years ago, we struggled to explain our family, assist gender mama, and a non binary papa, to our oldest kids preschool teacher. She really wanted to be supportive and helped share positive examples of families like ours with her class. But she kept talking to us about stories about two mom families that she wanted to highlight to help them understand. While we were glad that she was sharing those stories with the kids, we were also clear that we’re not a two mom family. But she couldn’t seem to figure out another way to explain us to her class. But just a few years later, things feel like they’ve changed so much. We’ve noticed just in the past couple of years, more people get what it is to be non binary, and more people seem open to the idea that parents might come in more flavors than cisgender moms and cisgender dads. But some of the form filling out challenges I’ve encountered suggests that our institutions and systems are still catching up. There are still school events like muffins with mom or donuts with dad, which don’t just exclude kids of nonbinary parents, but also exclude kids who live with other relatives or adults. Jess and their family have worried a bit about seeking a welcoming environment for themselves and their second kid who will be entering child care in rural Vermont soon.
JVN: They haven’t even started day care yet, but I’m like already, especially having gone through early childhood school with our oldest kiddo, and she’s, like, identifies a cisgender. But just as a queer family in like a rural small town was pretty hard or just like a lot of stress.
SM: I always felt too that the early childhood education and child care world was super obsessed with gender.
JVN: Even more so like in the schools, I feel like, you know, it hasn’t been some kindergarten that our older kiddo has had boys and girls lines.
SM: I remember when our kids were in child care during the potty training years. And the center had a special princess award for the girls, and a superhero award for the boys. Once they mastered using the bathroom at school. It always felt like we were asking so much, because we already had to make all this effort to establish ourselves as a queer family, and me as a nonbinary parent. And then asking them to reconsider the super gendered stuff they were doing with the kids on top of it, just felt like a lot sometimes. We did end up saying something about the potty training awards, and our kid’s teacher started letting the kids pick which award they wanted. So that was positive. But also still a lot.
JVN: There’s just like all the anticipation because it’s also going to be like my stuff you know, decide when to make it like just about my kid or when it’s about all of us. When to put my stuff down or like when it makes sense to hold it all at once.
SM: Interrupting all of this requires some proactive work on the part of queer and trans families and any families raising gender non conforming kids.
JVN: One tip I took from that book that I keep referencing is that when their kiddo started day care, they also like wrote a letter to all the other families and asked the teacher to just put it in the cubbies to be like Zoomer is joining the class and uses they/them pronouns and isn’t a boy or a girl. Which I think will probably do something similar and I think we’ll also do something similar for like parent names because already having a kid go through school and just exactly what you were describing – it’s like being “mom’d,” being “dad’d.”
SM: For my family, this looks like a lot of crossing stuff out on forms to write parent or papa instead of mom or dad. Or including both my lived name and legal name on documents, even when there’s not space to do so. Or making sure we meet with our kids teachers at the beginning of every school year to make clear that we are queer family that I’m nonbinary and make sure they can hold safe space, especially for our youngest child, whose gender is very fluid right now.
JVN: You know, there’s all of those internal things that happen. It’s like, well, I shouldn’t have to you know I don’t think we should have to do the legwork and it would be great if the space is just we’re more for us without having to like I always say like elbow nudge out some room with your elbows, right? Like I feel like that’s all I do all day every day.
SM: On the hopeful side, Jess’s older kid is just a little bit older than mine. And we both agreed that we feel like things have changed a lot in the years since our oldest children started preschool. I’ve definitely noticed each year that the conversations with teachers get easier.
JVN: When our daughter was in first grade, we did that pre meeting with her teacher and it was just so much easier. She heard of all these different terms before like nonbinary and things like that. She was like, I literally took a class about this. And I was like, thank god! You know, I don’t know where she went to school, but at least they mentioned that in their curriculum. Even that little bit of her language recognition was just a weight off of our shoulders.
SM: I think as social norms and expectations around gender expand, we’re more likely to encounter teachers who have learned these things in college, or as part of professional development trainings, and probably also more likely to encounter teachers who themselves are queer and out.
JVN: Seeing that just turn a corner a little bit even in the short time that our kid has been in school has been so hopeful and I’m like, things will only get better, right?
SM: Of course, a lot of this openness and ability to have these conversations at school hinges on the political climate. My family and I live in D.C., where there are many pockets of progressive politics, laws protecting LGBTQ folks, and plenty of other queer families in our community.
MMK: So I used to work at a high school and it was so cool to become a parent in this environment and that work setting where there are all these kids who are figuring themselves out and figuring their identity out.
SM: This is Meghan again.
MMK: There’s something cool about being an example to other kids. And showing them, you can do this. This is something that is a possibility for you. Because I never had like, we never had that growing up. We didn’t live in a space where that was not just like normalized, but possible in a very public and honest and transparent way. And so I definitely carried that. All right, I – ask away, ask all of the questions that you have right now. I am happy to be the person that talks about how this was possible for my wife and I and these are the things that we’re going through right now.
SM: She also noted that this is why things like the don’t say gay law in Florida are so terrifying. Because as a teacher or school staff in that scenario, she wouldn’t have been as free to share these things about her life with her students. Wouldn’t have been able to be a visible example to them of how queer families are made, and what queer joy looks like as you become an adult and move through life.
MMK: Definitely would not survive in Florida or another setting where public school teachers are, and instructors are under attack. But very happy that I could exist in that time and space and come into becoming a parent alongside a group of kiddos who were also bearing witness to my experience.
SM: Meghan lives in Denver, also a fairly progressive, diverse city in a state that is increasingly left leaning. But as Megan noted, there’s a lot to fear from the sorts of things going on in Florida, Alabama, and Texas right now. Being able to speak freely, both as a teacher and a parent about being queer, being free to affirm queer and trans kids, and being free to participate fully in society as non binary adults is critical.
JVN: Thinking of our older daughter, when she knows that her family is respected and valued in her classroom, like she does so much better as opposed to bringing home the stress of not feeling like we’re seeing holistically and then that like sitting with her all day at school, right? It’s not just about, like, our kid being respected at school. It’s about like our whole family being respected in a school community.
SM: Meghan’s Mitchells vs. the Machines, dog pig, loaf of bread reference, prompted me to go back and look for that clip from the movie. Only then did I remember how the movie actually ends. The metaphor is even more apt than I thought. The family realizes that their dog’s defiance of categorization is like a superpower that they can use to defeat the robots. As robot after robot keeps encountering the dog and spiraling into head-exploding mass confusion, the machines lose their grip on power and the Mitchells, and their dog, ultimately triumph. For nonbinary parents, maybe gender nonconformity is our superpower, allowing us to see the world in unique ways and disrupt the status quo.
ASH DASUQI: Ugh, I love, I love other queer parents. I mean, I love my queer Friends too, that are not parents, but I absolutely love hanging out with, and thinking with, sharing with, being in community with other queer parents.
SM: This is Ash Dasuqi, who we first met in our last episode on birth. Ash is a birth worker, but they’re also a queer, non binary parent, and passionate about the ways queer folks approach parenting from a place of critical thinking.
AD: Being a queer parent the way that queers are just inherently so magical because they bring intentionality and thought to what they’re doing. And so when you bring that to parenting and bringing up a new child, people that have the really direct experience of like, oh shit, there isn’t one way to be actually people are all kinds of different ways and all kinds of different ways are beautiful, is a pretty incredible energy to bring to a new being in the world.
SM: The nonbinary and trans parents I know, think hard about gender, parent around the concept of gender and creative and beautiful ways and make the most possible space for their kids to be who they are. Queer folks have had to fight so hard for the right to parent openly, and it makes me so angry to think about people who would deny, not just queer adults the right to be parents, but the rights of children to have queer and trans parents. This fight is political. It’s about power and patriarchy and white supremacy. Those things can sometimes overshadow queer, trans, and nonbinary family joy. But we know there’s magic here. And we’ll keep it alive.
AD: I feel that not many young kids in our society probably get the kind of depth of warmth and acceptance and support that I think queer and trans parents are capable of giving to their children.
SM: Queer parenthood, laundry, paperwork, chaos, joy, snuggles, and the gender binary. It’s like Legos. It’s everywhere, folks. So look out. And try not to step on it with bare feet.
SM: Next week, we’re talking family. Families of origin, families were creating, chosen families.
SPEAKER 1: Even though I loved my parents and my siblings very much, I still feel different around them.
SPEAKER 2: In my head being like, if only they could just get their kids pronouns, right, and being like, you know, it doesn’t have to be either or it could be both.
SM: Join us for Beyond the Binary, Episode four: Family.
SM: If you liked what you heard today, and you want to help us make more content like this, you can support Beyond the Binary through our Patreon page, Patreon.com/beyondthebinary. You can also find links to our Patreon page and more info about the podcast and the folks behind it at our website, beyondthebinarypodcast.com. Or follow us on Instagram at @beyondthebinary_podcast. Beyond the Binary is written, produced, and hosted by me, Sumner McRae. Co-produced by Barbara Schwabauer. Theme music by Sumner McRae. Special thanks this episode to Meghan Myron-Karels, Jess Venable-Novak, and Ash Dasuqi.
CHILD: Also, you’re welcome people who are reading this podcast. I hope you enjoy it.
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