Papa don't preach
Silly fears about lesbian dads are an irrelevance today, and may never amount to more than science fiction.- Mark Henderson, The Times
In an article in the Times, a columnist reassures his readership that “the End of Men” is merely mass hysteria with no foundation in scientific fact, and that “the dawn of an Amazonian dystopia” is not, in fact, nigh. What it amounts to, of course, is a backlash to the very hazy potential of two women biologically creating a child by terrified heterosexual men – “[t]he indignant railing against Nature usurped, of course, conveniently forgets that most women are not lesbians and will always find it more fun to breed the old-fashioned way.” God forbid that any woman should enjoy making love (or, for that matter, babies) without the presence of a man. It is a castration complex with parenting as the [supposedly envied] phallus.
By “silly fears about lesbian dads”, Henderson really means that the very idea of a woman taking on a traditionally male role – in this case, co-parent of a child – is at best ridiculous, and at worst unnatural. If my partner and I choose to have kids, there won’t be a father involved, regardless of the genetic make-up of the child. It may have my DNA, it may have hers, it may have neither. It may, due to some wonderful scientific advance, have both. But that child will have two mothers and, in all probability, no father. The use of gendered language to describe the non-foetus-carrying partner is deceptive – and designed to highlight the supposedly unnatural nature of same-sex parenting. It also rams home the idea of a binary gender system, one in which there is only biological male and biological female, with no room for the grey areas between the sexes, for someone to define as one gender but inhabit the body commonly attributed to the other.
It is equally an argument about that old bugbear of the Daily Mail, single mothers. Whilst a positive male role model in child’s life is something to be encouraged – I’d be the first to state that I benefitted enormously by one – it doesn’t have to be the father. Families can exist without the presence of a father, and that existance can be a happy one when the father figure would otherwise be a poor influence or have a detrimental effect on the family. Obviously the gender roles here can be reversed – women are no more natural parents than men are – and whilst no-one would argue that being a single parent is easy, it is often the lesser of two evils. Better to be in a stable and loving environment, no matter how many parents of either sex one has, than to be brought up in an attitude of either violence or indifference.
Labels: LGBT, parenting, reproductive rights, science
posted by Kaite @ 2:53 PM
3 comments
