Dear Heather: You Don’t Speak for Everyone

I should be writing other things. I should be creating new fiction or writing the blog posts I owe for my publisher’s upcoming anthology or at least finishing my series on bi representation. Instead, I’m sitting here seething at how Heather Barwick thinks she can speak for an entire community of people based on her personal views and experiences.

No, thanks.

She starts off with, “Gay community, I am your daughter.” No, she isn’t. She is the daughter of one person who is part of the lgbtq community. One (and her partner). Heather’s experiences and feelings cannot be used to describe what every person thinks or feels.

She goes on to explain how the “nature” of same-sex relationships make them bad for children, so she’s against gay marriage. There are so many wrong assumptions in that I’m not even sure where to begin. The sad truth is that this can and will be used by opponents of same-sex marriage to deny people’s rights, and anyone who dares disagree with Ms. Barwick is clearly a hateful person perpetrating “reverse discrimination” against opponents of marriage equality.

Here are the problems with her argument:

1. Her opening language leaves a lot to be desired. She has co-opted the phrase “coming out,” perhaps to get same-sex couples’ attention. That speaks to just how little she understands the closet and its implications. Heather cannot possibly believe she is going to be threatened in the same way that lgbtq people are when we come out. These are not equivalent.

2. She assumes all marriages are for the purpose of raising children. That negates the lives of any couple of any orientation who have chosen not to parent for whatever reason. She also assumes that all couples of any orientation who choose to have children are or want to be married. While marriage and having children often go hand-in-hand, that is not necessarily true across the board. Even her own mothers couldn’t possibly have been legally married while raising her. Denying same-sex marriages won’t prevent same-sex couples from parenting, and making them legal won’t automatically lead to parenting.

3. She assumes that the purpose of same-sex marriage is to “imitate” opposite sex “normal” marriage. Not quite. There are two things I dislike when discussing marriage equality: one, having it dismissed as “heteronormative”; two, having it celebrated as “heteronormative.” When two queer people get married or one queer person marries a cis-het person, their marriage is inherently queer. We can have a conversation about the problems that are not being addressed regarding legal marriages in general. However, there is something fantastically subversive about queer marriage. Patriarchal structures be damned—we are going to live out our relationships in ways that look like us, not like something out of last century (or earlier). When queer parents get married, it isn’t for the purpose of replacing a child’s mother or father any more than a cis-het remarriage is an attempt at finding another parent for a child. When same-sex partners choose to get married and/or have children together, it’s because they want to do those things, not because they want to play cis-het house.

4. She assumes all same-sex couples “withhold” adults of other genders, specifically the other parent. It’s not clear whether her own father stayed away because he didn’t like being a father, because he was angry at his ex, or because his ex barred him from contact. She cannot speak for anyone but herself and has absolutely no idea what other families do or don’t do.

5. She picks out same-sex couples specifically to blame. Instead of saying she wished her parents had done a better job of providing for her emotional and relational needs, she chalks it up to her mother and stepmother being lesbians. Interestingly, she uses the same language conservatives use to “prove” feminists are separatists who think men are unnecessary. There are opposite-sex couples who do a piss-poor job of raising their kids too, including keeping their children from being involved with their other parent. Yet no one is blaming heterosexuality. Maybe we should.

6. She demands some kind of honesty from other children of gay parents as though she can speak for them. She mentions divorce and adoption as having aspects that can be tough on kids, and there’s truth to that. It can be hard (in multiple ways) to be the child of queer parents. I fully expect my own kids to one day have questions and want to talk about ways I failed them. Being honest doesn’t necessarily mean opposing any of those things, though. It means simply being honest about what was hard and what was good. The big difference here is that Ms. Barwick is saying same-sex couples should not be able to marry or parent, but she is not saying divorce and adoption should be illegal.

It would be unfair to dismiss Heather Barwick’s life experiences as invalid. That is not what I’m trying to do. I’m exposing the problems in the way she’s chosen to scapegoat an entire community. Instead of telling her story about the challenges she faced growing up, she’s decided to apply it to all same-sex couples/families and make assumptions. She’s using it to stand against marriage, which doesn’t even particularly have anything to do with her situation anyway. The whole time, she says how much she “loves” gay people—so much that she wants to deny rights to same-sex couples, apparently. That’s a pretty funny way of showing love.