In your book, you show how LGBTQ+ families - lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer families - are still confronted with inequalities and discrimination despite legal progress. Where do the 19 families you interviewed experience the biggest hurdles in everyday life?
Julia Teschlade: When we asked about discrimination, many families initially replied that it didn't play a major role in their everyday lives. However, the stories revealed numerous challenges. It starts with starting a family: the desire to have children usually has to be planned very carefully and is often associated with legal and practical hurdles. These continue after the birth - for example, because the law currently only allows for two parents. For multi-parent families, i.e. families with more than two parents, this harbours great uncertainties, for example in the event of illness or death. In the case of lesbian couples, only the mother giving birth is automatically recognised; the partner must first adopt the child at great expense. Many also experience subtle and open hostility in everyday life. One mother described it like this: "The moment you have a family with a child in public, you are met with more hostility." Many report that they have to repeatedly explain and assert the "normality" of their family.
Why do these inequalities have such a deep impact on the reality of life?
Christine Wimbauer: These legal and social inequalities have a deep impact on the practices of LGBTQ+ families. Couples with two mothers experience the obligation to adopt a stepchild despite being married as a belittling of the non-birth mother. In multi-parent families, social parents lack almost all rights, which creates uncertainty and complicates everyday decisions. And the old Transsexuals Act, which was recently replaced by the Self-Determination Act (SBGG), conveyed to trans* parents (parents who have changed their gender entry in their civil status) for years that their parenthood is not legally recognised. Many perceived this as a devaluation. One interviewee said that he felt forced to choose between starting a family and changing his gender: "I thought about it for myself: What is more important to me? The decision to have a child, to get married, was ultimately only possible for me under the circumstance that the other was not possible at the same time." They show that the desire to have children in LGBTQ+ families is often associated with particular hurdles.
Which paths to parenthood emerged as particularly typical in your interviews, and how do these experiences differ from those of heterosexual couples?
Mona Motakef: LGBTQ+ people have long been denied the ability to start families at all. Carolin Callas, who has a child with her partner, emphasises this: "And if you live openly as an out young person, no one says to you: 'When you're married, when you have children' - that doesn't happen. And that's where you automatically develop". We therefore trace the often long and rocky road to parenthood for LGBTQ+ people and the social hurdles they have to overcome when becoming parents. Only when they can imagine themselves as parents can they think about and negotiate which options for becoming a family are open to them and which they want to utilise in the second step. The third step is the actual realisation. There are big differences here: Who can, wants to, should and may become parents, and how, differs legally, medically, biologically and personally depending on the composition of the parents-to-be, and is extremely complex.
A central concept of your study is the "normalisation behaviour" of LGBTQ+ families. Can you describe the strategies that families develop to make their 'normality' visible?
Julia Teschlade: Some interviewees present their families as "model families", such as Gustav Gernsheim: "We're a family, we all have jobs somehow. We live together. We bring up our children together. We are fully employed". In addition to emphasising their own "normality", other strategies for how families (have to) create normality are of a practical nature. For example, one interviewee described how they surprised their new neighbours with homemade cakes after moving in. They went from door to door so that nobody, according to Carolin Callas, "had to tear their mouths apart". As a lesbian couple, they act preemptively, fearing that other people will speak disparagingly about them because they are not heterosexual.
They realise that conforming to social family norms is not apolitical for LGBTQ+ families, but a survival strategy. What consequences does this have for the families concerned?
Christine Wimbauer: Our cases show that creating normality, or doing normality, is time-consuming and also very stressful for the families. This effort must also be made invisible as part of the desired normalisation - so the families are doing double the extra work. Many families go to great lengths to be considered "good families" - which we have identified as "hypernormalisation". The reason for this is that normalisation work is a basic prerequisite for protecting one's own life from external attacks, devaluations and injuries. However, through the normalisation actions of LGBTQ+ families, new things that are taken for granted can also gain significance and perhaps become the new normal.
Your book is being published at a time when legal reforms such as the Self-Determination Act are providing new impetus, but new exclusions are also becoming apparent. What course do politics and society need to set now so that LGBTQ+ families no longer have to fight for recognition, but belong as a matter of course?
Mona Motakef: This requires a broad alliance of law, politics and civil society. Consistent legal equality is essential: the obligation to adopt stepchildren must be abolished, multi-parenthood with more than two people must be made possible and gender-neutral parent names must be introduced on birth certificates. We need low-barrier access to reproductive procedures, provided they do not further perpetuate global injustices. Equally important is effective protection against discrimination and the elimination of structural inequalities, for example in the protection against violence, in employment and in the healthcare system. Last but not least, children and young people should be taught that family is diverse and is not defined solely by biological kinship, but by the fact that people take responsibility for each other on a permanent and reliable basis - regardless of gender and number.
The questions were asked by Ljiljana Nikolic
Further information
The book launch will take place on 24 November at 6 pm at the Faculty of Law, Bebelplatz 2, 10117 Berlin, Room E25.