LGBTQ+ Family Building in Virginia: The Emotional Considerations the Fertility Clinic Won't Cover
Every fertility clinic in Virginia will recommend that you get mental health support. Many of them even have affirming providers. What you need is a grounded understanding of the nuances of LGBTQ+ Family Building and emotional support for the adventure you’ll be embarking on. The process is practical, but you are human.
Building your family is a healing, joyful and purposeful act. You’re looking to create safe, fun and lifelong relationships.
The emotional work of this journey is deep. By the time you walk through those glass doors, you have thought about what you want your life to look like for many years (or decades). You’ve cultivated an intimate connection with what lights you up, and what is a hard “no.”
As a seasoned LGBTQ+ family and relationship therapist, I know that queer and trans people need creative spaces to explore those meaningful dreams, and find protection in their vulnerable moments.
The Clinic Handles the Body. Something Else Has to Hold the Story.
Hoping for the right donor, making tough decisions about who will parent, pivoting to other paths to family building and sometimes, deciding to live a child-free life. Your queer experience holds so much more than the literal way your family will get more members.
Family-building is about your identity, what you stand for, the legacy you wish to gift, the impact you wish to make, and the life you wish to share. It’s about tears in the hallway, that call upon deeper pains of loss and not having control. It’s about the worry of how everything is going, mixed with the daily dose of baseless phobic comments you might experience when you run in to the coffee shop. It’s the deep knowing you hold, that can still be shoved into doubt when too many people question you for being too trans/queer/non-binary, or not queer enough – as if we were that digestible.
Your emotional experience of this LGBTQ+ family-building journey is a valuable doorway to your inner values, the bond with your partner, and a safe circle of community support. Your clinic is doing the practical work. You need emotional supporters to hold your hand, and to hold space for your story.
The Conversations No One Schedules
Queer families often find themselves wrestling with nuanced topics when it comes to family-building.
In building your small family, you’re building a larger one too. There are lots of considerations to make regarding donors, biological family, chosen family, and anyone else showing up on your map right now. If there will be donors involved, you will be considering the important of genetic traits, DNA connections, meaning, anonymity, connection and your own family’s identity.
You will also be talking through the involvement of extended family. Who is invited to this party? What roles can your supporters play in meeting your needs every day, even when the needs are not visible?
And, who are the people you need to maintain strict boundaries with right now? These are likely the folks who don’t understand queerness, seek control or add criticisms. Your family-building journey is the perfect time to clean up your social media friend list, notice who you are spending time with, and intentionally connect with the people who lift you up.
You will also be talking through what it feels like to move through this – in your body, right now. In what ways is this experience pulling you into a gendered experience that doesn’t align? Consider what makes you feel off, and not yourself. At the same time, what feels soothing and authentic?
Set aside time to be present with your body. This might be in a quiet walk in nature with no phone, a ridiculously loud dance club full of sweaty queers, or when you take that first sip of morning coffee. You will be talking through the way this impacts your desires as a gestational or non-gestational parent, the birthing plan, and the infant care plans.
Folks often find that pregnancies and parenting can catch them in hetero- dynamics that are disorienting. It’s important to talk about how to keep queering it up!
Grief Inside Joy
This is a multilayered experience. Building your family includes joy and excitement, readiness and doubt, appreciation, aloneness, anxiety and dread.
You will be tossed around by pivots, decision fatigue, uncertainty and doing it all without a lot of information. Having hope for the future can also feel tough when the world keeps recapitulating its harms. Even in your strong sense of knowing, you’re grieving the loss of biological possibilities, of extended family who can’t show up, of the constrictive impacts of the binary box.
But, you will have your anchors. Those are the values that you keep coming back to – Raising liberated children, authentic living, self-expression, and deep unwavering love. LGBTQ+ family-building is a radical act of claiming your definitions and adding to the legacy of queer creativity that has been building for millennia.
Holding both is a skill that benefits from a therapist. That person can help you untangle all of the feelings and uncover new needs that need tending to.
Family-building is a time of shifting. You’ll be making new discoveries about who you are. You will also find your familiar patterns. Therapy is the perfect place to look at it all together, with a safe person who has your back.
What Therapy Actually Does Here
Therapy is the safe place to stay creative, stay queer and stay you. This is a place away from the noise where you can liberate your true feelings. It’s a place to do that alone, or together with your partner.
You may talk about ways to structure time for you and your partner to be together and ask, how are we? This would be a time when you describe what you’re experiencing (and it’s not about trying to conceive or parenting).
A therapist will give you the support you need to lean into the cues your body is giving and figure out your deeper needs. A therapist can help you notice when your body tenses up, and when the energy in the room feels different.
In this process, you will reconnect with your body and your queerness. You will identify what people, places and things you need more of.
Many queer folks experience medical, legal, emotional and physical challenges during family-building that bring up old traumas. A therapist can also help you safely share what you experienced so you can leave the session more grounded and clearer.
As you make sense of all the things you are feeling, your therapist can point out the clues about what you stand for and how this defines your family. They can engage you in writing, expressive art-making, using symbols and stories to consciously reconnect with your empowering traits. You will use your new understanding to make the important decisions. You will worry less about the perfect choice. You will focus on your choice.
You will decide what you want to stand for as you are building my family. When you look back on this, what do you want to remember? You’ll consider how you can queer up your relationship when you feel like you are in a cis-hetero relationship dynamic. You will talk about caring for your body as you consider infant feeding, identity in the body, and how you will connect with the baby.
Engaging in therapy is a gift you give to yourself and your future child. It can bolster your mental health, temper your stress, and may well even lead to a higher chance of pregnancy (Rooney & Domar, 2018).
A Note on Doing This in Virginia
LGBTQ+ folks who are building their families will find a lot of fertility clinic resources in Virginia. Unfortunately, most insurance companies will not cover LGBTQ+ individuals if there is no documented fertility problem. Virginia law also does not require employers to cover infertility care.
After your baby is born, Virginia LGBTQ non-gestational parents will want to complete a second parent adoption to secure legal parentage. GLAD Law’s Parentage Security guidelines explain that while a birth certificate may reflect your parent status, it does not legally establish parentage (thanks to outdated laws and discrimination). Family Equality’s State-By-State Overview describes the relevant Virginia Codes and process to expect when filing the petition to adopt in Virginia.
When seeking affirming care, allyship in Virginia can vary wildly. It is important to select providers who will be as supportive as possible to the LGBTQ+ experience.
You’ll want to find a therapist who specializes in this work, not just a generally affirming one. LGBTQ+ families, relationships, and family-building have specific needs and require deep expertise. New Moon Therapy supports queer and trans individuals or couples who are navigating family-building - in person in Richmond, or virtually across Virginia.
I’d Love to Hear From You
If you're navigating this and want a therapy partner who already understands the landscape, I'd love to hear from you. I can help you lead the conversation on your LGBTQ+ family, relationships and life so that you have peace, clarity and support during this amazing journey.
