"But Gays Can't Have Children"

I've heard this up and down so many times that it makes me sick. It comes from the mouths of supporters and bigots alike. When someone references a gay person having children or wanting children, eventually the response comes, "Two wo/men can't have kids."

It isn't always meant cruelly. Sometimes, these individuals assume that because someone who is gay "can't" have kids, that means they don't want them. Or if they can have kids, that they aren't biological.

I actually got thanked profusely for asking a lesbian couple if their children were biological, rather than assuming they were adopted. Shocker (sarcasm)-at least two of the three really were biological.

When I was in a University 101 class at my college, we were given a team-building exercise. In it, you were given an apocalypse-like scenario: 28 individuals have taken refuge in a nuclear bomb bunker only to find that you have enough for 10 to survive the fall-out period. Who do you choose to survive?

The individuals ranged from any age -including an infant -and could be any ethnicity or background. Some examples included a priest, a prostitute, a pregnant woman, a doctor, a mechanic, an elementary ed teacher, a university professor, and a young married couple.

The question is designed in such a way that without realizing it, you are assessing your own values. Is health more important than education? How much education is really necessary in society? If the doctor happens to be 85 and cannot procreate, does his ability to help others mean he still gets a slot, or do you assume that the others will know enough basic medicine to survive? If the pregnant woman is likely to die in childbirth, should we keep her around, or is it vital to cherish that new potential life? If we had to chose between religion and the college professor, which would it be?

Unsurprisingly, almost no one ever keeps the prostitute. Her story is one of a rape survivor who came from an impoverished neighborhood, was never able to finish high school and became a prostitute to survive. She doesn't know a trade skill and she has a basic education, so she doesn't really bring anything to the table, right? It wasn't until this same exercise came around in my sociology class that my teacher pointed out that she's a Survivor. Of anyone to come out of Armageddon alive, it's the survivor who's already seen everything there is to see who'll come out of it to the other side through sheer force of will.

Obviously, there is merit in everyone and this exercise is really challenging for most people. But what I couldn't believe was the readiness for people to throw the gay man under the bus.

His character profile was a middle-aged man, around 40 or 50, university educated and quite successful before the apocalypse. Essentially his only down-side was that he was gay (if you could call it that). And when I would tell this to people, the response I got was literally "but he's gay, so he can't have children."

In an apocalypse scenario, procreation becomes the most important thing. It is in this one scenario that an otherwise harmless identity -gay -becomes an actual inhibition.

But what strikes me about this the most is not the fact that there is a dialog about desirability but the fact that he "can't." It's as though straight people believe that gays lose all reproductive ability when they come out. I still bleed from my vagina once a month -I can personally attest that it didn't stop magically working when I came out. If it did, I think we'd have a lot more converts ;-)


So I brought up this point. Yeah, he's gay, but his dick didn't fall off when he came out. He's still fully capable of reproduction; so what's the issue?

I was then informed that a gay male wouldn't be able to have sex with a woman -it would be repulsive.

Just gonna throw it out there -no one assumed that of any of the other participants. Maybe one of these others was asexual and we didn't know it. Maybe two people were NOT each other's types to the point where is was repulsive. Maybe two people had grown up together and thought of each other as brother and sister. And yet because they were straight, they could buck up and reproduce for the cause -sexuality had nothing to do with it. So why suddenly does sexuality have to do with it when we're talking about a gay man and a straight woman?

It is not unheard of for gay individuals to have sex with straight friends in the desperate desire to have children. In fact, there was even commentary on it in the lesbian drama, "The L Word." So it's not unheard of for a gay male or lesbian to get over their lack of desire for the other sex in order to have children.

Why not then can we not assume that in a survival setting, a gay male would bite the bullet and have sex with someone they had no desire to have sex with?

Suppose, in a survival situation, something happens, and there only ends up being one or two procreative females. Eventually, someone will end up having sex with a relative. It's just basic genetics. No one is arguing that this would be something to be desired, but when we're talking about the propagation of the human race, individuals will do whatever it takes to continue the species.

No one is arguing that a man or woman would be forced to have sex with someone they had absolutely no desire for solely in an effort to continue the human race. And yet there's such a block when it comes to gay men and women that the layman believes it isn't even possible for a gay male or female to have children.

If it's so rare for lesbian women to have sex with men, why is "gold star" and "silver star" lesbian a thing? In fact, it's so common for a lesbian female to have had sex with a man before her coming out experience that we have terms for the degrees to which a lesbian has experimented with men.


All of this doesn't even broach the subject that gay men or lesbian women CAN have biological children in gay or lesbian relationships.

Suppose, for example, that you are a transgender female in a lesbian relationship. It is entirely possible for this couple to have children without any third party help. And, vice versa, it is entirely possible for a child to be born from a gay relationship if one of the men is transgender. This doesn't even count the fact that gender is so fluid at this point that "gay" and "lesbian" become arbitrary terms and the idea that only a "straight" couple can bear biological children is absurd. I'm skipping over that entirely valid point because -disappointing though it is, very few would claim that someone who is bisexual cannot have children. After all, they do have some attraction to male/female sex. I'm only touching on gay and lesbian individuals only, as this is where I hear most often the dispute that it is simply not possible for these individuals to procreate.

And of course, I haven't even touched on the fact yet that children do not need to be biological. In the case of a survival situation, there is nothing stopping a gay male or female to couple with someone of the opposite sex, and there are instances where a gay male or female will have undesired sex with an opposite sex partner in order to birth children; however, it is true that by and large, gay men and women would rather not have sex with the opposite sex.

I suppose as this is the case, it is extremely rare for gays and lesbians to have children. After all, the only way to acquire a child is to be genetically connected to it, right? So it would be impossible for anyone to have a child they were not directly related to. R-right? Hello?

In case you didn't realize, that sort of thinking is completely unintelligible. Even for straight people, you can have step children and foster children and adopted children and children from a surrogate mother, and children raised by relatives and even children raised by friends! There are so many other ways to have children other than biology that I genuinely don't understand how anyone claims that gays "can't" have children solely on the basis that they wouldn't normally have sex with someone of the opposite sex.

From a personal experience, I have three siblings. Two of those siblings are only related from my father's side, making them half-siblings. My half sister had a son, and then later married someone else and had two more children, meaning that those two children have a half brother. She later divorced and started dating someone else who had a son, meaning that all three of her children now had a step brother.

That's my half sister's children. My half brother has two children too. Neither one is biologically related to him -they're from an ex-girlfriend who lost a custody battle. So in my own immediate family, from my father down, there are 6 people at minimum who came out of an atypical family arrangement. That's my family only. My roommate has his own share of atypical family dynamics. I have a friend who is dating someone who has two children.I knew someone in college whose mother was raising this individual's daughter.

If 50% of relationships end in divorce, then there has to be a significant portion of children who are in some sort of "non-traditional" family arrangement. In fact, I would even argue that a traditional family arrangement where there is a mother and a father who have a child together without any offshoots is almost impossible.

And yet for some reason there are a lot of people who are entirely convinced that gay people cannot possibly have children.

What on earth kind of perspective do you have on where children come from?! Is there a homophobic stork out there that I don't know about? Honestly if you do all the math and go through all the permutations, it's not likely for anyone to have biological children only. So where does this utterly absurd idea that gay men and women can't have children come from? It's nonsensical.