Same-sex parenting

[2][3][4][5][6] Major professional associations of physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, pediatricians, therapists, and social workers have not identified credible empirical research that suggests otherwise.

[6][7][8][9][10] LGBT people can become parents through various means including current or former relationships, coparenting, adoption, foster care, donor insemination, reciprocal IVF, and surrogacy.

Furthermore, two countries (Estonia and San Marino) and one sub-national jurisdiction or dependent territory (Hong Kong) have legalized or permitted some form of step-child adoption.

Queer people are forced to hide or downplay their sexual orientation to fit these gender norms and appear as a more “suitable” and “legitimate” candidate for adoption.

[27][28] Sandy Schuster and Madeleine Isaacson, who met at their Pentecostal church, won America's first custody battle in favor of a lesbian couple in 1978.

[29][30] In January 2008, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that an otherwise legally qualified and suitable candidate must not be excluded from adopting based on their sexual orientation.

The city of Philadelphia ended its contract with CSS because the agency refused to consider LGBTQ couples when screening for foster care parents, stating that their actions were due to the religious belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

CSS operates other types of foster care services, like group homes, and received millions of dollars from Philadelphia regardless of the dismissal of their contract.

Some are concerned from a eugenics point of view, as this method would allow people to modify the cells that they are using, giving them much more control over the genes that would be present in the offspring.

[59] Children and young adults with LGBT parents are uniquely defined by the fact that they typically identify as heterosexual, but as a function of their membership in an LGBT-parent family, they are exposed to minority stress and experience the effects of adulthood.

[60] Regarding the transmission of gender roles, LGBT parents are caught between two contrasting images: "they are portrayed as either inherently different from, or essentially the same as, heterosexual families".

Many lesbian and gay parents are not open about their sexual orientation due to real fears of discrimination, homophobia, and threats of losing custody of their children.

Most research to date has been conducted on white lesbian mothers who are comparatively educated, mature, and reside in relatively progressive urban centers, most often in California or the Northeastern states.

Prior to publication in these journals, these studies were required to go through a rigorous peer-review process, and as a result, they constitute the type of research that members of the respective professions consider reliable.

Rosenfeld's study, "the first to use large-sample nationally representative data," found that children of same-sex couples demonstrated normal outcomes in school.

[6]A significant increase in methodological rigor was achieved in a 2020 study by Deni Mazrekaj at University of Oxford, Kristof De Witte and Sofie Cabus at KU Leuven published in the American Sociological Review.

[6][8][9][10][7] Sociologist Wendy Manning echoes their conclusion that "[The] studies reveal that children raised in same-sex parent families fare just as well as children raised in different-sex parent families across a wide spectrum of child well-being measures: academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse.

[6][8][66][72] There is evidence that nuclear families with homosexual parents are more egalitarian in their distribution of home and childcare activities, and thus less likely to embrace traditional gender roles.

In the abstract of the report, the authors stated: "According to their mothers' reports, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in Achenbach's normative sample of American youth.

"[88]: 87 A 2013 statement from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry states that children of LGBT parents do not have any differences in their gender role behaviors in comparison to those observed in heterosexual family structures.

[90] A 2005 review by Charlotte J. Patterson for the American Psychological Association found that the available data did not suggest higher rates of homosexuality among the children of lesbian or gay parents.

[9] Stacey and Biblarz and Herek stress that the sexual orientation and gender identification of children is of limited relevance to discussions of parental fitness or policies based on the same.

[94] Social interactions at school, extracurricular activities, and religious organizations can promote negative attitudes towards their parents and themselves based on gender and sexuality.

[94] Bias, stereotypes, micro-aggressions, harm, and violence that both students and parents can often encounter are a result of identifying outside of social normative, cis-gender, heterosexual society or having their identity used as a weapon against them.

[98] Practicing and developing supportive networks within schools and working towards resilience skills can assist in creating safe environments for students and parents.

[99][94] Stephen Hicks, a reader in health and social care at the University of Salford[100] questions the value of trying to establish that lesbian or gay parents are defective or suitable.

[101]Historically, same-sex couples have been absent, or misrepresented, in cultural representation resources such as advertisements, television shows, books, and films, since the institution of the Hays Code.

"[105] Gregory M. Herek noted in 2006 that "empirical research can't reconcile disputes about core values, but it is very good at addressing questions of fact.

[121] Additionally, a resident trans man from Toronto, Canada "was permitted to identify as [the child's] father on the province of Ontario's Statement of Live Birth Form", marking a decoupling of genetics and bio-sex in relation to parental roles.

Many trans individuals cite, since their younger years, not wanting to have children or become pregnant due to the body and gender dysphoria that accompanies childbearing.