The Trans Community Can Learn from Adoptive Parents

Picture this: a couple in their late thirties adopts a newborn after years of infertility and more years plowing through the adoption bureaucracy. They call the baby Julia, a name shared by ancestors in both their family trees, and quickly bond with her. After everything they’ve been through, they can’t believe their luck. Julia is an angel.

Then comes the call from the adoption agency: Julia’s birth mother has changed her mind, two days before the end of the 30-day grace period. Grace period? Wait, what? The agent reminds the couple that, in their home state of California, even after the birth parents have consented to the adoption, they have “30 days to submit a signed revocation and request the return of the child or sign a waiver of the right to revoke consent.” 

A similar law holds in British Columbia, where “the birth mother may revoke her consent to the adoption in writing within 30 days of the child’s birth. This can happen even if the child has already been placed for adoption.” 

And now the birth mom wants Julia back. The next day the same agent who handed the newborn to the adoptive couple comes to their house and, amid their frantic kisses of Julia’s cheeks, punctuated by sobs, removes Julia from their care. The birth mother will call her Eve.

Or consider this scenario. A mother gives birth to a little boy, but has no idea who the father is. She puts the baby up for adoption and posts a notice on Facebook, with photos of the infant. An interested couple soon comes forward and the adoption goes through. In the meantime, one of the birth mother’s previous sexual partners comes across her Facebook post, notices that the baby has his ears, and gets a court order for a DNA test. Yup, he’s the dad.

What are his rights in such a case? As outlined on the popular legal information site HG.org, if he signs the birth certificate, the justice system may enable him to “establish legal and possible custody rights to take the child from an adoptive family.” 

A Class within a Class

Women have described, in memoirs ranging from Waiting for Daisy to In Search of Motherhood, the outrage and despair they felt when a birth parent’s change of heart tore their new babies from their lives—in some cases, after all the papers had been signed. They had brought the baby home, started bonding with it, joined parenting classes. They were the baby’s lawful parents, but…not quite. 

Although the law recognizes adoptive parents as full parents, in most jurisdictions it also gives biological parents the right to change their minds for a limited time after the birth. The logic is that the bio-parents cannot fully grasp the reality of their situation until the baby arrives, so it’s only fair they should have some time to reconsider their pre-birth decision. From the adoptive parents’ perspective, it’s a punishing process. At the same time, adoption carries a high risk of trauma to adoptees, so the law accords a healthy respect to the biological parent-child bond.

Adoptive parents know, and everyone around them knows, that they are not “exactly the same” as biological parents. They’re a class within a class, with their own set of triumphs and tribulations. They belong to a different club. It’s not fair, but life has never promised fairness, so they deal with it.

See where I’m going with this? 

Trans rights activists have not made the same concessions to reality, even after society enshrined gender identity into law. Even after transgender people obtained protection from discrimination in housing, employment, or education. Even after the law made it possible, in most parts of the world, for people to retroactively change the sex on their birth certificates. 

Legal recognition of self-declared gender identity was a momentous and somewhat astonishing development, given the fractious nature of identity. Identities can shift over time. In children with gender dysphoria, puberty itself may wash it away. What’s more, as many people have pointed out, we don’t allow people to identify out of their age and their race. We view these things as material realities that no “inner feeling” can displace. We’ve made an exception for gender because…well, just because.

Conflicting Rights

Not satisfied with their decisive legal victories, trans activists want more. Male-to-female transitioners, in particular, insist not only on legal recognition as women but on having the full rights and protections of people who have lived all their lives in a woman’s body, even if their demands conflict with natal women’s rights.

Most jurisdictions agree that no rights are absolute, and it falls to lawmakers and judges to balance clashing rights on a case-by-case basis. As Italian comparative law professor Federica Giovanella notes, “balancing is central not only to law, but also to life in general. It mirrors what happens in – particularly democratic – societies.” 

The Ontario Human Rights Commission describes this balancing act as a “search for solutions to reconcile competing rights and accommodate individuals and groups, if possible. This search can be challenging, controversial, and sometimes dissatisfying to one side or the other.” In essence, both sides must accept that, as Mick Jagger immortalized in song, “You can’t always get what you want.” 

Such arguments don’t hold sway with trans activists. They want the law, and society, to regard them as indistinguishable from any other type of women. That’s their argument: they’re women, period, not a type of woman. Not a class within a class. “Trans women are women”—a proposition that can neither be proven nor disproven because it rests on an interpretation of reality, rather than reality itself—becomes their a priori. Women’s shelters?

Of course trans women should have access, because transwomenarewomen. Women’s competitive sports? Of course they have the right to participate, because transwomenarewomen. Women’s prisons? Well, yes. Transwomenarewomen, are they not?

It’s as though an adoptive mother demanded to join a support group for biological parents with postpartum depression or C-section complications, because, well, adoptivemothersaremothers and it would be adoptaphobic to exclude her. 

I Want, Therefore I Get

It’s not just women’s sex-based rights, but their embodied experiences, that trans activists insist on claiming for themselves. Hop on YouTube and you’ll find an abundance of videos instructing trans women on how to simulate a period—using ketchup for color and ice cubes in the vaginal canal for leakage—and even how to use machines to mimic period pain. 

Simulation isn’t good enough for some of them: they insist they actually have periods, even though they lack a uterus, and desperately want others to buy into the mirage. “How can I prove to people that trans women can menstruate?” asks someone in a Quora discussion forum. Another participant argues that trans women experience symptoms like “bloating, appetite changes or mood swings while doing HRT [hormone replacement therapy]. Do you think this is a good enough reason to say trans women also have periods?” 

Trans women deserve the experience of breastfeeding, too, so they’re damn well going to do it, even though the FDA has not approved domperidone, the most effective drug for inducing lactation, for any reason and warns of its possibly serious cardiac effects. 

The audacious paradigm advanced by the trans community—I feel, therefore I am—has metastasized to “I want, therefore I get.” And while nobody was looking, reality left the building, leaving a naked emperor in its wake.

Have you ever heard of an adoptive mother stretching out her cervix with tongs just to experience the cervical dilation that signals impending childbirth? Or going to the supermarket with a pillow stuffed under her T-shirt, so the outside world can see her as the pregnant woman she deserves to be? Or making TikTok videos about the terrible first-trimester nausea she experienced after adopting her baby, soon followed by an inexplicable taste for pickles and ice cream, back pains, and Braxton-Hicks contractions? Didn’t think so.

Adoptive parents, as a group, accept reality. While some feel called to adopt from the outset, many only come to the decision after years of trying for a biological child. They would have loved to experience the phases of pregnancy, to feel the ancient forces of procreation coursing through their veins. 

They would have loved to have uncomplicated rights to their children, without the worry of a bio-dad popping up with a lawyer’s letter or a birth mom pushing the limits of an adoption agreement. But life didn’t hew to their script, and they understood that you can’t always get what you want. They cursed and they grieved—and then gracefully stepped into a different kind of parenting, leaning into its joys and accepting its limitations.

The trans community could learn a thing or two from this group.