The Queer Parent Q&A
Happy Pride month! It’s time to celebrate and educate with Lotte Jeffs and Stu Oakley, podcast co-hosts and authors of The Queer Parent: Everything You Need to Know from Gay to Ze. Covering everything from Trans parenting to surrogacy, The Queer Parent is a one of a kind (literally) parenting guide for the LGBTQ+ community - plus everyone else who is committed to educating themselves. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Lotte and Stu to ask them your questions. Here’s how they answered…
What inspired you to write this book?
There hasn’t been a book about how to be a parent if you’re not heterosexual published by a mainstream publisher, so wanting to fill that hole was our first inspiration. We were doing a podcast together about our experiences of becoming parents through adoption and fertility treatment and we realised that there was so much more to say and so many more amazing people we wanted to talk to. So, we set about exploring the whole spectrum of queer parenting from surrogacy to trans parenting to having kids at school and talking to teachers, to what not to say to queer parents… It’s an alphabet, literally, of everything you need to know.
Who was your favourite contributor?
We can’t pick a favourite because we spoke to parents across the entire queer spectrum, and actually the person we spoke to who was one of the perspectives we enjoyed the most, wasn’t a parent himself! It was Theo who is the son of Sandi Toksvig, TV presenter and comedian. Theo talked about his amazing life with his incredible two mums and then Sandi also did an incredible introduction for us for the audio book where she spoke about the troubles her and her partner had when they had their children in the late '80s.
What did you learn while writing the book?
We learnt about so many different perspectives. So the experience of say a trans person who becomes pregnant, versus somebody who uses a surrogate, versus a lesbian couple who use an IUI [a method of artificial insemination], or Stu’s adoption story, it’s all so different. There’s a core thing that's the same; we’re all queer parents, but our way to get to that place has been so different. So, for us that’s the main thing that we learnt.
How can I talk to my children about LGBTQ+ families and community?
Everybody should talk to their children about LGBTQ+ people, families and communities. You can do this by reading any number of the brilliant picture books that are out there or by just reminding your kids when they’re playing that it doesn’t always have to be a ‘mum’ and a ‘dad’. It could be two dads, it could be two mums - have fun mixing up those Sylvanian families! Just reminding them that it exists for them as a future in case that’s something they may end up wanting one day.
Who/what helped you during your own journey to start a family?
Honestly, there really wasn’t that much out there which was the main reason why we wanted to write this book in the first place. A lot of it was just word of mouth, tracking people down, asking questions, finding forums online, frantic google searching - there was no one place. One thing that really helped me [Lotte] was sperm and choosing a donor. We couldn’t have had a baby the way we did without that. It’s something we talk about in the book, the experience of choosing donor sperm. We also give people advice on things to say (and not to say) when they meet people who have become pregnant or started a family that way.
How can ally parents support LGBTQ+ families?
Well, you can buy us all a drink when you go to the pub! No, seriously, buy the book, educate yourself, expand your mind to all the ways LGBTQ+ people can become parents. Don’t just leave it to the queer parents to make the change. Be the person who says, “Hey, maybe our WhatsApp group doesn’t need to be called ‘The Mums Group’ and could be called ‘The Parent’s Group’ instead.” It’s such a simple thing but it makes those spaces feel so much more inclusive for people like us and it’s nice that we don't have to do that work.