Hope Comes From Court Wins and Family Building!
Hello there, lovely people! It’s me, transgender Mr. Rogers (I’m manifesting creating this as my reputation), coming at you live with a boatload of thing to be hopeful about! I also did a WONDERFUL interview with Marea Goodman, from their organization supporting trans, queer, and nonbinary families: PregnantTogether and I’m SO excited to share that with you! As I’m building up GQN more, I am learning that I want to highlight people who are doing amazing work that could be a great resource for the folks I am connected to here, and Marea was an amazing person to kick that off with :)
Also, there’s now 15 THOUSAND people here listening to what I have to say? This is actually totally bonkers to me. This is a number bigger than what I can fathom, but I still can fathom enough to know that it’s a real gift to be a person worth trusting for you all. Thank you so much for sticking with me here. I’m glad I’m not the only one who cares about hope!
A few upcoming educational events worth checking out:
TONIGHT! PFLAG National has put together an absolutely phenomenal national campaign called “Fighting For Our Pride” to empower grassroots advocacy to support and protect the trans and queer community. If you’re not sure how to begin your advocacy journey, this is an amazing place to start! Join the launch or learn more here!
November 11th, 7pm, FUTR (Families United for Trans Rights) will be hosting a conversation with ALOK!! They’ll be discussing the amazing candidates FUTR supports, plus how and why to lead with joy and storytelling at this difficult moment. Register here!
Not technically an event, but some actions worth committing your time to! Jess Craven from Chop Wood, Carry Water has compiled a phenomenal list of copy-and-pasteable text messages to send to friends, family members, college roommates, acquaintances, etc. about upcoming elections all around the country! There is not such thing as an “off season” election anymore, and it’s critical that folks get out and vote. This year has been a prime example of how much your local politics—state supreme court, governor, attorney general, school board, library board, etc.—impacts the resistance against authoritarianism! Check out the list here and send a few texts TODAY!
Quick Hits: Good News Abounds!
A federal judge has ruled that Trump cannot pull funding from schools teaching LGBTQ+ inclusive sex education! 16 States sued the administration to defend their freedom of speech and their right to teach accurate and research-backed sex-ed, and this is a huge win! (LGBTQ+Nation)
The New York City Public School System, the largest public school system in the country, is suing the Trump administration for attempting to pull $47 million in funding unless the schools enact a series of discriminatory and cruel policies against their trans students. Way to fight back!! (Erin in the Morning)
After a coordinated campaign from advocates across the country, Candace Owens’ Australian visa has been DENIED! She was hoping to plan a tour around the country spreading her signature brand of hateful, inflammatory discord, but has been barred from visiting the country. (CBS)
A federal judge in Virginia has ordered the department of defense to restore 600 books to the school library and reinstate lessons on race, gender, and identity to schools that serve military families. (Advocate)
Universities so far have continued to reject the Trump “compact” for priority funding in exchange for creating a campus that’s more hostile to trans students and international students. Hell yeah! If your university has rejected the compact, don’t forget to reach out and thank them for their courage! (TIME)
The Michigan budget had 18 anti-trans provisions included. Thanks to advocates across the state, every single one was removed!!
Philadelphia will be opening one of the first LGBTQ+ visitor centers next year as a part of the 250th birthday of the United States. (LGBTQ+Nation)
I read this piece from Uncloseted Media about healing from religious trauma, building community, and creating the change our younger selves deserved to see. If you aren’t already a huge fan of Uncloseted like I am, you will be after reading this piece!
Interview Time!!
Last week, Marea Goodman (they/them) was kind enough to sit down with me for an interview.
It was a beautiful blend of personal storytelling, talking about their amazing work in the queer family-building space, hyping up their first-ever virtual conference on queer family building, and appreciating their warmth and generosity towards supporting me at the beginning of my own fertility journey (!!!!).
They were also kind enough to share a discount code for Good Queer News subscribes to join the pregnant together virtual community and get access to support groups, resources, and educational programming that they put together!
They’re also hosting an amazing virtual conference next month (November 4th and 5th to be exact!) about queer family building called TOGETHER, and it’s going to be absolutely amazing. I’ll be there for sure!
Okay, now let’s hear it right from Marea!
Ben: Why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are and the work you do!
Marea: Yeah! So I’m a midwife, and that’s really how I got into the work was with birth and prenatal care and in 2016 was working primarily with the queer community doing intrauterine insemination. During the pandemic I connected with another midwife who also does fertility care and realized there hadn’t been a book on queer family formation for a long time, so we wrote a book together that came out in 2023 called “Baby Making for Everybody!”
During that process I also got pregnant and gave birth and through the stories I had heard and hearing over and over how isolated and overwhelmed queer folks felt in the process, so I saw the need to create Pregnant Together, which is a virtual community that brings together people on their family building journeys! We have support groups, resources, threads, and it’s been so awesome to be part of building it and growing it, and this year we’re doing a virtual family-building conference as well.
The conference will have educational content for families as well as providers in the family planning space, as well as community-building focused gatherings and raffles!
Ben: Talk to me about the radical hope of queer family building!
Marea: When you are a parent, you need to care about the future. You need to be hopeful about the future. There’s so much heartbreak and so much grief but also so much wonder and joy in parenting. To me, it really is the most hopeful investment we can make into the world and the future. It’s not for everyone, but it’s such a beautiful thing. I’ve been someone who always wanted to be a parent and becoming a parent has been such an amazing part of my own journey towards becoming more nonbinary—I’m a mom and a dad to my kids, and there’s something so lovely about that.
When you are a parent, you need to care about the future. You need to be hopeful about the future. There’s so much heartbreak and so much grief but also so much wonder and joy in parenting. To me, it really is the most hopeful investment we can make into the world and the future.
When you’re building a queer family, you have to be so intentional about how it happens. For many of us, we have to really decide we want to do this and we have to invest so many resources into making that happen, and there is something so beautiful about being a queer parent and getting to nurture this tiny humans in a way that is true to our own authenticity as well as to theirs.
Ben: There are a lot of reasons that queer folks might choose not to have kids that aren’t necessarily because they don’t want to have kids. What would you say to someone who wants to build a family but feels like they’re not able or allowed to do that?
Marea: I honestly see that come up a lot. Especially if there are fertility challenges, there are these deep seeded internalized homophobia and transphobia messages that come up that say “I’m just not meant to do this.”
One of the ways that homophobia and transphobia works is to make us feel like we exist so far outside the norm that we can’t have any of the things cis, straight people have, and there’s this narrative around heterosexual family building that it’ll happen when the time is right, which isn’t even always true for heterosexual people.
Queer family building happens because you want it to. That’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful gift for our children to be able to know how wanted they were, how much we did to become their parents. We need a new narrative about what family building as a queer person looks like because it requires a lot of different things from us.
Ben: My wife and I are about to start IVF appointments. What do I need to know? What resources do you have?
Marea: There are a bunch of things I’d share for you to think about!
1. There are a lot of fertility providers that aren’t great at working with queer families, and a lot that are. If you can, shop around to try to find an inclusive provider that can understand your family, and can include you in the journey as the non-gestational parent.
2. Use our resources! We have non-gestational parent support groups, as well as guides on picking a donor, or genetic testing, or relationship challenges, or timelines, or things like that.
3. You never know what your journey will be like until you’re in it. There’s so much unknown in the process, and having a space where you can share your fears and your frustrations where other people really get it will make a major difference.
Ben: Tell me more about this conference! What will you have? Who is it for? Why did you put this together?
Marea: It is for queer parents, parents-to-be, and the professionals who support them.
When Trump started his second term, I felt really clearly that queer family building was the advocacy I wanted to focus on for our community. There’s a reason the conference is on November 4th and 5th! I wanted to make a space for all of us who care about queer families to come together. We’ll share knowledge and resources and just be together!
There’s a legal panel on how to protect your queer family, a queer reproductive-endocrinologist talking about some of the recent research about queer family building, a mental health professional, a session on racial justice in queer fertility care, an economist doing a session on fertility research, a panel on trans and nonbinary parents, and so many other fun and awesome things. There will also be continuing education for midwives and therapists and others who are working directly with folks who are on their family building journey.
Ben: I love that so much! I know I’ll be there, I’m excited!
Marea: I’m excited to see you there!
Ben: There’s a lot of amazing advocacy work you’re doing so I want to ask one of my favorite questions now: How do you sustain yourself? What do joy and rest look like for you, especially as a parent?
Marea: It’s definitely a moving target! I have a lot of old man hobbies. I go to the beach to collect sea glass, I do puzzles with my kids, I play basketball, but honestly doing this work and feeling how relieved people are to be in the space where they don’t have to explain themselves it makes me feel so aligned with my life’s purpose. I feel so lucky that my work makes me feel like I’m contributing something so positive to the world and to our community and it’s very energizing for me.
Ben: I totally agree, there’s something so magical about knowing that you are getting to spend time doing work that you genuinely really love to do and that makes a difference.
Marea: Yeah, it really is such a privilege.
Ben: What haven’t I asked about yet? What else do you think people need to hear?
Marea: I think a big thing is really broadening our definition of what family building looks like. Parenting is a verb, and you don’t have to be biologically related to your child to have that. We have a lot of internalized homophobia and transphobia about who gets to be a parent, and we in fact get to be so creative about it and bring something really special to that.
I love getting to bring my nonbinary-ness and an expansive sense of gender into parenting my sons.
The ways that queer people come to ourselves as we walk through the world, and the strength that we are forced to develop as queer people in this society are such gifts to bring to parenting. There are so many ways children are asked to give up parts of their authentic selves and as queer people we are uniquely prepared to really support and protect our kids in being those full, authentic selves and to radiate that out into the world. That’s a gift to them and to everyone they come in contact with.
I think the world actually really needs children who are raised by queer and trans and nonbinary parents in nontraditional ways.
I couldn’t have possibly picked a better note to end on! I’m so appreciative of Marea for joining me, and to you all for your continued support of this project. Don’t forget that you can get a discount to join the Pregnant Together community since you’re part of the good queer news squad!!
Okay, that’s all I’ve got for today folks. Keep looking for the joy, because it’s always out there!!
With all my love,
Ben
Transgender Mr. Rogers is sooo the vibe! Congrats on 15k subscribers. Love everything you're doing to spread joy!
Thank you for sharing Sean's story :). While his upbringing was extremely tough, he is a survivor of religious trauma and Christian extremism and is *absolutely* a good news story.