“Was it a natural conception?,” the doctor asked. Karina paused for a moment, “yes”, she answered.
“I thought you said you had a wife…” the doctor replied.
This scenario would play out several times over as we explained at medical appointments that we had conceived our baby ourselves, using the ‘Turkey Baster’ method. This meant it was a natural conception because it wasn’t IVF which was the only other option on all of the forms.
It might seem strange to share with the world how we made our baby, Sanna, and other details of our life but somewhere in the haze of pregnancy sickness we realised we had an opportunity to educate.
As a queer couple having a baby, there’s plenty of questions and there’s also plenty of homophobia. Perhaps we could answer some, and eradicate some.
If we could show that queers having kids is perfectly natural, regardless of the method of conception or how many mums or dads, perhaps we could make the world a little bit safer for those kids and their families.
This is how the idea for our book “If Queers Weren’t Meant to Have Kids…” was born. It is both a satirical picture book for adults and a love letter to rainbow families. We cheekily poke fun at conservative culture warriors and use our personal story to celebrate chosen family, guncles, the queens and the gaybourhood.
A recent study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that after two decades of gains for LGBTQ+ visibility and rights in many countries, anti-LGBTQ+ targeted hate and rhetoric are on the rise.
In the offline world this presents as a surge of hate crimes, book bans and government and legislative actions. Online, the queer community is subjected to coordinated harassment campaigns, a rollback of digital protections and systemic erasure from AI training data and moderation.
We didn’t need a study to tell us this – it is something we experience firsthand.
When we announced on social media we were having a baby and also publishing a book, the first wave of responses were congratulatory and positive. It was in the second wave that the trolls came, leading us to suspect the post had been shared to an anti-LGBTQIA+ page which was encouraging people to spread hate on our announcement.
“Bloody disgusting,” granthoogendyk commented. Disgusting was one of the most used adjectives by the trolls.
“Poor kid,” justjoe000, and too many others to list, said.
We were accused of child abuse for denying a child the right to know their true biological parents and told hell is waiting for us.
Mostly, the trolls were angry because they’d decided our baby wouldn’t know its father, which is apparently integral, in their view, to it not having ‘mental issues’.
But it was the comments claiming that two lesbians cannot have a baby that reaffirmed for us why our book is needed.
Two lesbians did have a baby. Many have. So have two dads. Whether these babies are conceived through IVF, surrogacy, or using turkey basters, their conception is natural.
Not only is it natural, the wonderful thing for these children is that they are never an accident. Their parents jump through any and every hoop they have to in order to bring them into this world, and have the privilege of loving and caring for them.
Research shows children of queer parents do just as well – and sometimes better – than those of heterosexual parents. Unsurprisingly, the trolls are wrong. Kids in rainbow families actually have better outcomes in psychological wellbeing and child-parent relationships.
The kids are more than alright, and so are their parents. We would hazard a guess that two loving mums is better than knowing a dead-beat dad, who spends his time spreading hate online.
Our babe will know the man who gave us the greatest gift anyone ever could, and she will call him Dadda. But we don’t respond to those judging other families, and who are trying to write our story for us.
Instead we wrote our own, because as Nelson Mandela said, “hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that”.
If Queers Weren’t Meant to Have Kids (University of Queensland Press, $29.99) is out November 4.
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