My Son Is Not Synthetic

My son is not synthetic

In approximately 9-weeks time I’m going to become a father. This weekend will mark week 29 of the pregnancy, and due to its specifics, labor is likely to be induced around week 38. If all goes to plan, before the end of May I’m going to be solely responsible for the life of a beautiful baby boy. I’m fortunate. In spite of the absurd lies told by society about masculinity, the instinct of fatherhood It’s the culmination of over 18-months of planning, and some extreme good fortune. It is of immense importance to me, it is not an anaemic thing, it is not a subordinate or inconsequential thing. I’m fortunate because for many gay men there is no way to easily realize the desire to be a parent. Unsurprisingly, and contrary to the picture of commodification painted by Domenico Dolce, there is no easy solution for a man wanting to become a father, where the old fashioned way is not an option. There are no uterus shops, no egg banks that we can go to, and in my country it’s even illegal to pay for surrogacy. For many men, therefore, adoption is the only option, and given the complexity of the adoption system, not to mention what was until recently open hostility to gay men, and particularly single gay men, adopting (hostility that Dolce verbalises in his recent contributions), often that option is no option at all. I am fortunate because I have a very close female friend who has spared me all of that, a gay friend who loves and values me enough to want to offer me an opportunity at something I had given up on.

My son was conceived by IVF using donor eggs. For the last 28 and a bit weeks he has been gestating away in squirmy, kicky happiness, and in 9-weeks time he’s going to come into this vast, incredible, complicated world and his entire life is going to be dependent on me. Everything he’s going to need, is going to be my responsibility: feeding and cleaning, nursing when he’s sick, boundaries when he’s acting out; toys, stimulation, education; he’s going to need to be shown how he can contribute to the world, how he can enjoy it, how he can live his life in it. Above all, he’s going to need the unconditional, unswerving love of a parent. And in that, he will be absolutely no different to all of the other children that come into this world, however they are conceived.

Nothing about him, therefore, and despite Dolce’s assertions, is synthetic. He is a real person. He has intrinsic value, and he has value to me, and to his mother, and to his wider family, and to the people who come to be his friends, to the woman or man who’ll one day be his lover. None of that is synthetic. None of that is less just because he was conceived by an egg “from a catalogue” and nurtured in the uterus of a woman who has had no sexual relationship with his father. His conception was no less an act of love, simply because his parents didn’t consummate a romantic relationship. The mere fact that we went to such extremes to bring him into existence is the exemplar of an act of love. Unlike in the case of some children conceived the “traditional” way, no child born in this manner is born for any other reason than love. No child born this way is unwanted, accidental, forced. Who is Domenico Dolce or Stefano Gabbana to say that the act of love that led to my son’s conception is a poorer kind of love, is an unworthy kind of love, is a less valuable kind of love than between a straight man and a straight woman? My love for my son is as fierce as any emotion I have ever felt; it isn’t a second place love. If his mother and I don’t love each other as a straight man and a woman might, what does it matter? I dare say our relationship of mutual respect and friendship will endure longer and be more productive than many marriages, and if anyone doubts the statistical fragility of straight relationships, I invite them to take a look at the divorce statistics for North America and Western Europe, or come spend a day with me in the Family Law Courts.

Western society has come a long way in a short period of time, and being gay doesn’t have the stigma that it used to have. But that doesn’t mean that it’s “easy”. There are still places in the world where they want to murder me just for being gay, places where I’ll be imprisoned, or whipped, or stoned, or hung, or thrown off a rooftop just because of who I fall in love with. There are still places in the West where I’d be called a pervert, or told I was disgusting, or that I was going to hell because God hates gays. There are still far too many places where people would call me “fag” or “homo” to my face, without knowing the first thing about me, except my sexuality. There are places where the majority believe I should never be allowed to have a family of my own, I shouldn’t be allowed to get married, I shouldn’t be allowed to be a father. Places where people think it’s perfectly okay to deny me the most fundamental, primal desires that most (albeit not all) human beings have: to be loved, to love, to have a family, to be a parent.

None of that is okay, but you get used to it. You don’t tolerate it, but you get used to it. After all, it’s a message, in one form or another, that I’ve heard since the day I was born, and sometimes from those closest to me. And, even now, that kind of stupid, evil homophobia isn’t the only obstacle I face. Even now, today, in 21st century Britain, there are obstacles I have to negotiate simply to be a parent, to be a father. Social policies that seek to restrict parenthood to couples, which put a limit on surrogacy and babies born by IVF. Laws which completely subordinate my rights to my son to the good will of his mother: I have no power to enforce the agreement I have with my friend, I have no inherent legal right to my child, in the same way that she has. If our friendship falls apart, my only recourse is the long, prohibitively expensive march through Family Law Courts that are weighed to favor the rights of my friend (regardless of her actual genetic relationship to my son), and which will likely facilitate whatever unreasonable behavior she might possibly choose to indulge. This, the archaic sentiment of a society simultaneously indulging oblique misogyny and explicit hypocrisy. But again, while none of that is okay, it’s something I’m used to, sufficiently used to take a calculated risk, to act on the trust and affection I place in my friend. Homophobia, bizarre quirks of sexism, I can cope with. I’m used to that.

What I find hard to cope with, however, is such nakedly stupid and vicious bigotry from within the LGBT community itself. I would expect such intentionally cruel comments from the usual suspects of the fanatical (“Christian”) right; I would not expect them from two luminaries of the LGBT community. I would not expect such idiotic, consistently disproven assertions as they have expressed: “The only family is the traditional one,” says Dolce. Whose tradition? Biblical tradition? Which one? The traditions in the Gospel? The traditions in Leviticus? Exodus? In Genesis? Or do you mean white European tradition? Then what of all the non-white European traditions that don’t look like yours? What about the countless traditions of countless non-white cultures extant in the world today that look nothing like your concept of a traditional family?  ”A child needs a mother and a father. I could not imagine my childhood without my mother. I also believe that it is cruel to take a baby away from its mother,” says Gabanna. Really? Firstly, that’s both an argument from ignorance and an argument from incredulity, and therefore a logical fallacy and therefore invalid; and secondly, your beliefs are completely irrelevant to fact. And the facts are these: No reputable sociological or psychological study conducted on children of gay couples (or gay singletons, for that matter) in the last decade, have shown any direct causation between the number or genders of parents and the wellbeing of their children. In fact, and to really put the knife in here, the children of gay parents tend to be, on average, smarter, happier and healthier than those of straight couples. So, not only is the argument invalid as a logical fallacy, it’s also simply wrong in fact. That it is an argument made by those who ought to know better makes it even worse.

And, there can be no argument that Dolce and Gabanna, of all people, should know better. I indulge a stereotype perhaps, but I struggle to believe that they are completely insulated from other gay people in light of their chosen profession; and they are also clearly smart and successful people, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they should be quite capable of weighing the arguments on both sides, and concluding - as anyone with a brain and a moral compass has done - that the argument against gay families raising children is discredited, amoral garbage, and has no place in civilised society, much less coming out of the mouths of two gay men who should be leading the call for equality. It’s their failure of responsibility that is as unacceptable as the content of their convictions. Rather than using their influence in the public eye to advocate for - or at the very least, to support - the rights of gay families, they have instead given succour to the very homophobia that feeds the various irrational and discriminatory laws that seek to deny queer men and women the right to a family life, a right that should be inalienable for all. I don’t know what informs such convictions, whether it’s gross stupidity or a form of internalised self loathing, and I don’t much care; I do care about the words they have chosen, I care about what they have said about my son, and my family, I care about what message that sends to LGBTQ men and women, girls and boys, the world over; and I care that they have singularly failed to live up to their obligations as gay men with a public platform.

My son is not synthetic. My family is not synthetic. I am not a lesser parent because I’m not in a relationship with a woman, or because I’m - more or less - raising my child alone. How dare you, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabanna, say such offensive, hateful, deceitful, ignorant things about me and my family, and families like ours. How dare you. And how dare you seek to shield yourself from criticism by playing the martyr, by asserting freedom of speech and decrying all who call you on your foul, stupid, bizarre moral illiteracy, as fascists. There’s no fascism here, only the well earned calumny for a pair of ignorant, self loathing men, who lack the imagination or the moral courage or the intelligence to crawl out of their received archaic attitudes to family. You chose to put those words out there, and now you must suffer the consequences of them. That’s not bullying, it’s just quid pro quo.