What are family dynamics like for trans and nonbinary folks with kids? How does this shape our relationships with our families of origin? How do we create and nurture our own new families? Why are the bonds we have with our chosen kin so strong? This week, we talk with new guest Dylan Flunker, and again with returning guests Jess Venable-Novak, Meghan Myron-Karels, and Ash Dasuqi. 

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Episode resources:

The Guardian: “The new American family: Trans, gender queer, nonbinary, two-spirit.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/jun/20/american-family-trans-gender-queer-nonbinary 

Frontiers in Psychology: “Division of Labor Among Transgender and Gender Non-binary Parents: Association With Individual, Couple, and Children’s Behavioral Outcomes.” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00015/full 

Them: “Between the Binary: On the Gratitude I Feel to My Chosen Family.” https://www.them.us/story/gratitude-for-chosen-family-during-coronavirus 

NBC News: “How the Black queer community is re-imagining the family tree.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-queer-community-re-imagining-family-tree-rcna16134

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:

The Queer Family Podcast: https://www.thequeerfamilypodcast.com/ 

Gender Reveal Podcast: Transgender Parenting “Starter Pack”: https://www.genderpodcast.com/starterpacks

Books:

Blood, Marriage, Wine, and Glitter (S. Bear Bergman)

For the kids:

Neither (Airlie Anderson)

Jamie and Bubbie (Afsaneh Moradian)

My Maddy (Gayle E. Pittman)

Episode Transcript:

SUMNER MCRAE: Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out why it bothers me a bit that my spouse’s siblings’ kids call me Sumner. All of our niblings are on my partner’s side. I’ve noticed that when talking to the kids, while most of her extended family refer to folks as Uncle Matt or Aunt Mary. Rarely does anyone call me Uncle Sumner, or Aunt Sumner. Both sound weird, and neither sound right, so everyone, kids included, mostly just refers to me as Sumner. 

We’ve never had an explicit conversation about it, and I don’t even know what I would want my partner’s siblings’ kids to call me. None of the options feel quite right. I don’t need an honorific. I’m very comfortable just being on a first name basis with my niblings. But it does mean that my relationship to them is not acknowledged in the same way that other family members’ relationships are. The point isn’t the title, per se. The point is that when you’re a non binary, trans or queer person, there’s a lot of education you have to do with the people in your life, and that things like parenthood amplify this education project a thousand fold. And when we step back from that education, or have a moment where we ourselves aren’t sure how to navigate it. The consequence is sometimes that we are set a part a bit, or relegated to the margins of the places where we should feel the most grounded and most whole. 

Welcome to beyond the binary, a podcast about non binary folks, navigating a binary world. Our first series of episodes center on parenting in the gender binary. I’m Sumner McRae, your host on this journey. I’m queer, non binary, and a parent. This is episode four. Family. 

When I think about the concept of family, I think about family of origin, the families we create together with our significant others and our kids and the people we share our homes with. And the chosen families that coalesce around us over the course of our lives, especially as trans and queer folks. S. Bear Bergman has a great collection of essays on this topic, called Blood, Marriage, Wine, and Glitter about the ways queer folks experience and make families. When people become parents, all these family dynamics can start to shift a bit, especially when we throw gender identity and queerness into the mix. What are family dynamics like for trans and non binary folks with kids? Both with the families we came from, and within the families we’re making. How does parenthood shape our relationships with our families of origin? And why are the bonds we have with our chosen kin so strong?

There are many queer and trans folks whose families of origin don’t accept them. Many queer and trans people become alienated from their families because of fundamentalist religious beliefs, bigotry, and fear. But even when our parents and families of origin want to support in affirm us, those relationships can still be fraught. Our families of origin don’t always have the language, knowledge, or tools, to create a space that feels unconditionally loving and open. 

Most folks in my parents generation just didn’t have the resources needed to help us come into ourselves and thrive in our gender identities as queer and trans kids and adolescents. 

DYLAN FLUNKER: They knew that as a teenager, I was like struggling, but they didn’t know what I didn’t. I didn’t know what you know. They were probably more worried about me than they necessarily let on, which I think I realized in hindsight as a parent. 

SUMNER MCRAE: We’re hearing the voice of Dylan. Another dear, longtime friend, and chosen sibling. Some years back, we were both contributors to the blog Dylan and two other transparent start it up, called Queer Dads, now archived, but that you can still find floating out there on the interwebs. Dylan has a master’s degree in public policy and works in the trans healthcare space. He’s read more books than probably anyone else I know, and is a rad trans dad, to two awesome elementary school aged kids, and a poodle named sparkle. 

DF: Sparkle space wonder, in full. 

SM: I’m sorry, I didn’t get the full name.

DF: Sparkle for short. 

SM: Dylan has been out as trans for a long time, and went through medical transition many years ago as a young adult. He has positive relationships with his family of origin, who have mostly been very supportive of his transition and gender identity. But that support hasn’t come free of struggle. 

DF: You know, I can’t necessarily undo some of the rough aspects of growing up being like a trans kid trans queer kid who didn’t know they were trans and queer. 

Coming into our gender identity for a lot of us allows us to reimagine what our lives might be like. Never thought that I would be a parent when I was a teenager or even like an early college. I didn’t really feel like a possibility until I was able to settle into my gender and be like, oh, I would be a dad. And then it was like, yes, of course. I want to do that. Suddenly, things that used to seem like they were for other people. Feel like they can belong to us. And it can shift things for our parents and families of origin too.

DF: I think seeing that I was so happy and surrounded by a community of joy, I think really shifted something for them in being able to not ever use the wrong pronoun again, not ever mess up with the wrong name. 

SM: Still, while Dylan’s family has accepted and embraced him, the challenges of continuing to educate his family about gender remain. For example, like so many trans and non binary folks I know. Dylan has had to work hard to help his family grasp concepts like gender fluidity. 

Part of the urgency Dylan feels to make sure his parents understand, not just his own trans experience, but the vastness of trans and non binary identities is that Dylan’s younger child is non binary themself. 

DF: My youngest child is non binary. Initially they were told us they were not a boy or a girl. And then it sort of like refined into non binary. And so trying to loop back through that with my parents has been kind of tricky just because they’ve… just my parents are struggling with that. 

SM: I think a lot of cis people will look at trans people who would identify themselves as like, okay, I was assigned female at birth and now I have transitioned to male and I want to be a man. They’re like, okay, I understand that. There’s two boxes. This person felt like they were in the wrong box. So they’re going to move over to this box. And… 

JESS VENABLE-NOVAK: Totally. 

SM: Good. Got it. I can understand that. But then like you interject a sort of like gender nonconformity or gender queerness or non binary identities into that and they’re like, what? 

JVN: Yeah. 

SM: But which box? And I’m like, that’s the problem. 

JVN: I know. I feel like you just – my parents are lovely people, but I feel like you just described my parents perfectly, right? 

SM: This is just venable Novak again, who we met in episode three. 

JVN: It’s like they can get – they can get the narrative of like, well, I was raised this way, and then I knew it was not right. And I knew there was like this other thing I was supposed to be. But the idea that there is not necessarily like an other, it could be like a both an aunt and neither or some combination is like too much for people to hold, which I think speaks a lot more to like how our society set up than those individual people. 

SM: Jess has also found that some older relatives struggle with using the singular they them, both for Jess and for their baby. 

JVN: We just visited my family and there was a lot of gendered pronouns. But honestly, it’s usually by what they’re wearing, which is like not surprising but hilarious – they’re wearing like… One of their little jackets is pink, and then they get like “she’d” all the time. But then their snow suit is blue, so they get “he’d” all the time. Like it’s just like so hilarious to me. 

SM: Advocating for your own kids as a trans non binary parent is challenging, especially when you’re working through moments where you feel like you have to set your own gender identity aside to get what you’re asking for for your kid in their relationship with grandparents or extended family. 

JVN: Yeah, I feel like it’s an extra layer and last time you visited my parents you know like tripping up on like my pronouns and then also our kiddos pronouns and in my head being like if only they could just get like her kids pronouns right and being like why does it have to be every you know it doesn’t have to be either or it could be both you know. 

DF: It’s hard in some ways because it feels like having to renegotiate my own pronouns again. I find that it’s way easier with other not in my family people to advocate for my youngest just because it’s easier to just be in my role of I’m this kid’s parent and my job is to give them as much space to just be themselves. 

SM: Almost anyone who is non binary trans or queer has had to do work to advocate for themselves with their parents and families of origin. But that constant education project is both exhausting and at some point can start to feel like a condition of our relationships with our families. 

DF: Yeah, I was reflecting on, like, family of origin and just feeling like part of my family, but just also kind of always feeling that sense of separation or like distance. Maybe that’s just like what people feel when they grow up, but like even though I love my parents and my siblings very much and like I know that I’m like loved by them and I know that I still feel different around them. 

SM: The experience of growing up trans and queer and having to navigate so much of that in isolation and dealing with all of the shame, confusion and fear, but also not always having anyone to share our joys and yearnings with has directly informed the kind of parent I want to be to my kids. I think some cis parents in our generation are also doing a lot of good parenting around the expansiveness of gender and human sexuality. But as a queer, non binary parent, I feel especially equipped to provide my kids with something better and healthier than what my generation got, or our parents generation, or their parents generation got. 

DF: My spouse and I really tried intentionally from when our oldest was you know very little, just, we talked a lot about how are we going to just offer new toys, new experiences, new clothes, and just sort of like really like, we want to have an array of colors and array of textures like an array of activities because it doesn’t serve anyone when you’re just like, oh, this is the track of activities and toys you need to be interested in, just our role isn’t to necessarily shape that, but just to kind of offer the array. 

SM: For a lot of queer parents, this feeling like we have a chance to remake the world, extends beyond gender identity and queerness and into other things we want to do differently when we form our own families. 

MEGHAN MYRON-KARELS: It’s been really liberating becoming a parent, honestly, because I’m like, holy crap, I have the ability to actually I can be really intentional right now. It’s gotten me to change my mindset for the better. 

SM: This is Megan Myron-Karel again. 

MMK: It’s also helped me shape and reframe so like we all, we all are carrying trauma from how we were raised from the parents in our lives or the parent figures in our lives. Like I love my mom, and she had a really difficult time managing and processing and moving through her own trauma that prevented her from being a good parent to me a lot of the times. And so I’m like, all right, cool. These are the things I don’t want to do as a parent. But since the kids have been born, I’ve really shifted my mindset from these are the things I want to avoid doing and making it more of like, this is the type of parent I want to be. So these are the things I want to do. And these are the ways I want to show my love. This is how I want to show up for my kids. Which has also like led me to be thinking a little bit more critically and proactively about the things I want to do for my own person. They learn so much by just watching how you move through the world. I want my kids to know that I am passionate about a lot of different things. And I can have a lot of different interests and that not just one thing, and that we can all be complicated and be celebrated in our complexities. 

ASH DASUQI: I sneak this little parenting segment in my class at the end, which is really unique to a birthing class. 

SM: Here’s Ash Dasuqi, who we heard from earlier this season in our Birth and Kids episodes. 

AD: Which is usually talking about power dynamics and how to acknowledge the power differential between a parent and a child and ways to, like, while acknowledging that, be able to uplift and empower children. 

SM: I feel like a lot of what you could call a queer approach to parenting and creating our families revolves around asking the question, why? Why do we have to fit into rigid gender roles? Why do some people have power? Why are so many spaces segregated by class, race, and gender? 

AD: I never looked like acted like loved like in the way that I was told to or supposed to taught that I would find my family and my mainstream society and stuff like that. So I just think from the get go, I was like, huh, I can’t just trust the things that are being spoon fed to me, which I think is like part of what makes all queer people uniquely special, uniquely magic, is just like having to ask that wow, I’m being told this one particular narrative about the way that things are. But I know differently, I feel and experience differently. So what else is up about what I’m being told? 

SM: Building our own families gives us the chance to question the more authoritarian parenting styles that were common in previous generations. It also gives us the chance to really work out our roles in our new families without the heavy gender baggage a lot of our parents carried. Queer, trans and non binary parents, also tend to divide household labor. In more equitable and rewarding ways than both our parents’ generation. And fellow cis folks in our same generation. 

AD: There’s actually studies, a few pretty small scale studies on this that show that on average LGBTQIA+ couples nuclear family units and families in general feel more satisfied about their divisions of labor, inherently just because they are consenting to what they do rather than defaulting to the heteropatriarchal norm where, like, the cis woman wife figure a person would the more frequent indoor chores, and then the masc person would do the infrequent outdoor tours just like how it defaults, but that doesn’t mean that people are satisfied with that separation because they did consent to it. 

SM: These kinds of departures from traditional expectations are a huge part of how we make our families and how we imagine a new world for ourselves. 

AD: I believe that trans people have been prioritizing joy for themselves personally in their own lives above so many other values that our society tells us are more important than our own joy.

SM: I just want to say one more thing here about trans queer and non binary parents, and the way we raise our families. A recent news story about the new anti-trans bill looming in the Florida state Senate quoted the Republican state senator who introduced the bill as saying, quote “the decision about when and if certain topics should be introduced to young children, belongs to parents.” He continued, “The bill also protects students and teachers from being forced to use language that would violate their personal convictions.” End quote. This is not a new sentiment among conservative lawmakers, but it’s one that I can’t get past. I keep thinking about my family’s personal convictions around gender. How hard we’ve had to work to protect ourselves and our kids from imposed cisgendered expectations. And how laws like these are such a violation of our values and identities. I keep hearing Kimmins from our birth episode in the back of my mind. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD: We have the right to have a family and to do it this way. 

SM: Kimmins was talking about trans and non binary folks giving birth. But that mantra stays with me every time I encounter someone who doesn’t get our family. Keeps insisting on referring to me as a mom. Tries to force our youngest to be more masculine or us to parent in ways that align with traditional gender norms. We have the right to have a family and to do it this way. We also have a lot of work in front of us to defend that right. But we’re standing on the shoulders of queer and trans activists who came before us. And we have each other. 

SM: Chosen family is a big part of my life, and this podcast. I’ve known Dylan and Megan for almost two decades. We met in college and bonded over the shared challenges of being out, queer, and gender non conforming in our small rural Iowa college town. Even 20 years later, that bond feels unbreakable. We don’t live in the same parts of the country anymore, but we visit each other when we can. Keep in touch regularly. Sometimes daily via text, and rely on each other for advice and support. We dream of more chosen family reunions, where not just us, but our kids, too, can deepen their bonds to each other. My partner and I have also created chosen families here in D.C. On more than one occasion, I’ve called members of these chosen families in the middle of the night during a crisis. Taking one kid to the ER and needing to drop the other off for an impromptu sleepover, or needing someone to make a run to CVS for supplies, after one of my kids fell out of bed and split their lip at midnight while I was solo parenting. Not all of these things are unique to queer folks. Many people have close friends like this. But for queer people, I think chosen kin has such a great significance, partly because so many of us are cut off from our families of origin. Either literally, or in some ways, because even though our families accept us and love us, not all of our families really get us. As non binary, queer and trans folks, we don’t often get to have the shared experience of queer struggle and queer joy with our families of origin. The place where we feel that sense of belonging is with each other. As parents, it’s also about having people we can call on for support without having to navigate all the baggage and dynamics of our families of origin. 

DF: Yeah, I think, you know, chosen family has been, it’s been interesting. Who can you text after having not texted for a few weeks or even months and be like, there’s this thing that is going on in my life and who can you know will be able to make space and time and be like, yes, 

SM: Once we become parents, sometimes chosen family can shift a bit. 

DF: Folks that I was in relationship with in friendships and chosen family relationships before I had kids, and then afterwards, because I was really in several of my friend groups, we were the first people that had kids. But yeah, so the folks – the friends and family that we’ve sort of cultivated after has been different. And I think it’s kind of like deepened or expanded kind of my sense of who do you call family? One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed is becoming, our chosen family from college that has extended all of us becoming parents, but also becoming friends, closer to people, LGBTQ people here who are also parents that I didn’t really know beforehand and just the thing that I really appreciate is that kind of just like wider circle of care for my kids and people that are delighted by my kids and want to show up in my kids lives. 

SM: For me, chosen family is about more than just friends who become so significant in my life that they’re like family. It’s about being seen for who I am. It’s about sharing a history and a culture. It’s about being able to let my guard down. It’s about the intangible thing family is supposed to be about. The feeling that when you’re with them, you’re really home. 

SM: There’s a book we read to our kids called Neither. The characters start out in the land of This and That, where characters can either be a bird or a rabbit, but nothing in between. Then a new character, who is part rabbit and part bird shows up and gets bullied because they want to be both. At the end of the story, the main character finds the land of all, where there are no rules about this or that. Where everyone is different and themselves. In our House, one of our kids is gender non-conforming, and we celebrate that, and give plenty of space for both of our kids to be themselves and enjoy everything they love, without the constriction of gendered expectations. Our oldest child grasped the concept that people exist outside of the gender binary early, and she is often the first to call us in when we assume the gender of somebody we don’t know. My partner is cisgender, but she breaks with plenty of gendered expectations directed at women. And me, I’ve come into my trans non binary identity as a papa, and just feeling free and happy and at home in that as a family. I mentioned all this with someone recently about the book Neither and how we do things in our family. And they smiled and said, your house is the land of all. 

SM: The last episode in our opening series on non binary parenthood drops next week. But we’re already thinking about topics for Beyond the Binary Season Two. We want to keep making the pod and sharing these stories with everyone. In order to do that, we need your help on a few things. Number one, please go to Apple podcasts or Spotify and follow rate and review beyond the binary. More 5 star ratings and listener engagement with our show helps more folks find us so we can widen our audience. Two, if you’re on Instagram, follow the podcast @beyondthebinary_podcast. We’ll be posting extra content announcing our plans for season two over the coming weeks. Three, share your favorite episode from this inaugural season of beyond the binary with a friend or family member. Thanks to everyone for your support so far. Next week, we’re pulling everything together in an episode on non binary trans and queer parent community. How do we find community and connection with other non binary parents online and in person? And how do we see ourselves and people like us reflected in media and history? 

SPEAKER: And she told me that, hey, there’s just a queer Black parent group, but I just really feel like you should be a part of. 

DF: Like, if you don’t see yourself reflected in the stories that are around you, how are you ever going to sort it out? 

SM: Join us for Beyond the Binary, Episode 5, Community. Beyond the Binary is written, produced, and hosted by me, Sumner McRae. Co-produced by Barbara Schwabauer. Theme music by Sumner McRae. Special thanks to this episode to Dylan Flunker, Megan Myron-Karels, Jess Venable-Novak, and Ash Dasuqi.