David Schwartz, a psychoanalyst and psychologist who has spent his decades-long career thinking about the ways in which gender and sexuality get constructed, however, isn’t so sure eschewing traditional parental labels is good for L.G.B.T. (Others feel the institution reinforces an unfair hierarchy that privileges matrimonial coupledom above all other forms of romantic coupling.)ĭr. people who refuse marriage because they don’t want to be “assimilated into this heterosexual, patriarchal society,” Dr. people don’t want to seem as if they are aping heterosexuals: “There’s a political component for some, which is that we don’t want to seem like we’re emulating or mimicking straight people.” Similarly, there’s a contingent of L.G.B.T. Goldberg said, “because of greater legal recognition and acceptance.”Īlso, Ms. “Now there’s more willingness to push some of those boundaries,” Dr. people have secured, particularly the right to marry. Kahn surmise that the couples who are using new terminologies are willing to do so because of the hard-won rights L.G.B.T. It found that of 80 participants - 20 lesbian couples and 20 gay couples - recruited from adoption agencies across the United States, including cities with high concentrations of lesbian and gay populations, all opted for derivatives of mother and father.Īnd nearly 13 percent - 20 percent of the lesbian couples and 5 percent of the gay couples - participated in some version of “undoing gender.” Many do this by taking parental names from their native cultures or religions that strip away the binary in this cultural context, collapsing the dichotomy between terms by merging them, such as “Mather,” a fusion of mother and father, or creating nicknames (“Muzzie,” in one instance).īoth Dr. family scholar Melissa Manley, a doctoral student, and Emma Frank, a recent Clark graduate, is one of the few on the topic. Goldberg, Clark University’s pioneering L.G.B.T. The duo’s ambivalence about traditional monikers is reflected in a study, currently under peer review, on the naming practices in same-sex adoptive families. Davidson said, “So in some ways, our choice of names helps us affirm our identities.” Naming is particularly important to the pair as a means of signaling their queerness, since they “pass” as a straight couple.
Schankler remembers reading the queer writer Andrea Lawlor’s essay on identifying as “Baba” (as opposed to some iteration of mother) in Mutha magazine and thinking that “dad” or “daddy” wouldn’t work for them either, so they opted for “Abba.” It means “dad” in Hebrew, providing a link to their Jewish heritage: “It does feel more gender-neutral, or at least doesn’t have quite the same baggage that dad and daddy have,” Mx. “I was racking my brain for a mama-alternate, but it feels right for the moment,” she said, adding that in her universe, “identity wiggles around,” and she’s open to other possibilities.
she refrained from calling herself anything vis-à-vis Felix for the first two weeks of his life. The binary clashed so much with how the couple sees themselves and exists in the world - she’s queer-identified, and her partner goes by pronouns they/their/them and uses the gender-neutral title Mx. “‘Hi, Mommy! Where’s Daddy? Mommy needs to know this, but so does Daddy,’” she said with a big laugh. When Amanda Davidson, a 42-year-old Los Angeles-based artist and writer, welcomed her firstborn child in December - a boy named Felix - with her partner Isaac Schankler, 39, a composer, she chafed at the assumptions the medical staff members made about how the pair wanted to identify themselves as parents.