Permission to Live<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cOoo, she\u2019s pretty!\u201d said Sally.<\/p>\n
I smiled. Haley is a transgender woman, and I was pleased that Sally immediately identified her as female. I started flipping through Haley\u2019s pictures, and Sally admired them and was excited to note whenever Haley\u2019s children appeared in the pictures with her. And then, finally, I came to a picture of Haley with Melissa, smiling into the camera with one of their daughters sandwiched between them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s Haley\u2019s daddy,\u201d Sally said, pointing at Melissa.<\/p>\n
(Sally doesn\u2019t have a grasp on the terms \u201chusband\u201d and \u201cwife\u201d yet. Instead she is liberal in her use of the terms \u201cmommy\u201d and \u201cdaddy.\u201d In other words, Sally was saying that Melissa was the daddy in Haley\u2019s family, and Haley was the mommy.)<\/p>\n
I frowned. Here I was feeling pleased that Sally had no trouble identifying Haley as female while not even realizing<\/em> just how heteronormative Sally\u2019s upbringing was making her. I scrambled mentally, wondering exactly how this could be. We live in a very liberal college town, after all, and Sean and I have numerous LGBTQ friends. It\u2019s not like they\u2019re never around when Sally\u2019s around, either. Just the other evening we had a gay couple we\u2019ve known for years over for the evening (Sally was quite taken with the chocolate pie they brought!). What I realized, though, is that none of the LGBTQ individuals Sally comes in contact with in her day to day life have children, and that, to my knowledge, the children she knows all have both a mommy and a daddy.<\/p>\n\u201cActually Sally, their family has two mommies.\u201d<\/p>\n
And with that, we went on flipping through Haley\u2019s pictures. See, it\u2019s not that Sally has a problem with a family having two mommies, or two daddies, it\u2019s just that in her limited experience every family she\u2019s known (every family with children, that is) has had a mommy and a daddy. So she (quite naturally) assumed that that\u2019s how it is for everyone.<\/p>\n
And now I think it\u2019s time to head off to the library to check out Heather Has Two Mommies<\/a>, And Tango Makes Three<\/a>, In Our Mothers\u2019 House<\/a>, and King and King<\/a>. Oh, and All Families Are Different<\/a> and All Families Are Special<\/a>. Sally and I have some reading to do.<\/p>\nFeel free to suggest additional resources!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The way children construct their understandings of the world is fascinating. I recently learned that Sally, based on her lived experience thus far, was operating under the assumption that children always grow up with a mommy and a daddy. This wasn’t intentional or taught, but is rather simply born out of the fact that, at this point in her life, she she has not yet known any children from LGBTQ families.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[110],"class_list":["post-12292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","tag-lgbtq"],"yoast_head":"\n
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