On Adopting My Biological Child
I gave birth during the first Trump inauguration. Now, I’m adopting my biological child before he takes office again.
It is November 2016, and I am six months pregnant. As I leave the polls with an I voted sticker above my left breast, I feel the baby stirring—no longer the tiny, popping, butterfly flutters of the first trimester, not quite the broad, shrugging rolls of the final weeks that I don’t know to expect yet. My husband and I don’t want to learn the sex of the baby, because we want to get to know them in utero without characterizing every moment as “sweet,” or “strong,” or pink or blue. We just call them the baby, or sometimes, French fry, as a joke. I don’t have dreams or premonitions about the sex of the baby, but as I cast my ballot for Hillary Clinton, part of me wonders if one day I’ll get to tell my daughter that we’d voted for the first woman president together. I like the thought of us becoming links in this growing chain of history.

Two months later, as I labor over an exercise ball in my bathrobe, Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.
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Giving birth to my baby was the most powerful I’ve ever felt in my body. After years of painful periods and infertility, it felt like my body was finally working for me. It felt cool. I loved giving birth. I’d do it again in a heartbeat (as long as I never had to breastfeed again).
That baby was so small and perfect, even if he did take a shit on me almost immediately. It took us an entire week to decide his name, the midwife filing his birth certificate at the last moment. We deliberated back and forth over what to put on that one line. Like most first-time parents, we wanted to get everything just right. Despite the political chaos, our little apartment felt safe. It seems impossible that those quiet, exhausted days were most of a decade ago.
A lot has changed since those early days of parenthood. My co-parent and I moved across the country and amicably divorced. I changed professions and came out as queer. And I transitioned.
The last few months have trapped me in time. My memories of those months in 2016 and 2017 are so deeply tied to the whole-body experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, and here we are again. I’ve had a hard time focusing at work. I keep getting my words, my years mixed up. I look at my son, and he is almost eight years old, and he is a newborn, and he’s a figment of my imagination, all at once. A podcast I listen to described the anticipation leading up to this election as like being very pregnant with your first child: “It could go well. But even if it does, it’ll be awful. Or I could die.”[1]
My election stress dreams were a mix of body-surrealism, medical trauma, and political terror. But as anxious as I was about the upcoming election, I don’t think I’d actually let myself believe that he would win again. And then he did.
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The default way this country determines parentage at birth is charmingly straightforward: whose body did the baby come out of? That’s mother/parent 1/mama. Is that person married? Congratulations, that’s father/parent 2/dada. From a bureaucratic perspective, these are both things that are relatively easy to verify at the time, regardless of genetics or relationship or intent to parent. Since Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (or earlier, in individual states), this has allowed married same-sex couples to both be listed on their children’s birth certificates, an important milestone for the legal recognition of queer families. However, this standard is imperfect, and does not recognize the myriad ways in which families are formed in 2024.
When I changed my name and gender marker, I was thorough. I updated every piece of documentation I could, including my birth certificate, my driver’s license and passport, my school records. I have the paper trail that shows the whole process. But there was one thing I couldn’t change, because it doesn’t properly belong to me: my child’s birth certificate.
My kiddo still calls me mom, unless he’s deep in Minecraft and a stray “dad” slips out. He tells his friends his mom is “a they now.” He knows who his parents are. We share a last name, and a home, and half our DNA. There’s no question that he is my son. A name change can’t erase that.
My name change wasn’t just a last name associated with marriage or divorce; or changing my first name to another “traditionally female” name. It doesn’t match the “mother’s maiden name” on his birth certificate at all anymore. I have a beard and a driver’s license with an M on it, and I don’t know if I could convince a hostile (or even just obtuse) party that I’m his mom. I don’t know if it would always be safe to try. What if something happens to his other parent and someone tries to assert that he isn’t my child? What if we need to cross an international border? What if we’re trying to register him at a new school, or take him to a new doctor’s office? I don’t want to be outing myself at every administrative opportunity.
I tried to explain the situation to my father: your evidence is only as good as the person you’re trying to convince decides it is, and in an administration that is increasingly rabid about citizenship, documentation, and the basic dignities of transgender lives, any discrepancy is a risk I’m no longer willing to take.

In the hours after the 2024 election result became clear, my focus solidified. I needed to spend this time doing what I could to protect my loved ones now. My friends started getting passports, getting marriage licenses, getting hormones and surgeries and name changes. And I started looking for answers about my son’s birth certificate. I reached out to other queer and transgender parents I knew, and posted anonymously on forums. I submitted inquiries with LGBTQ legal services, and attended info sessions on parentage law, like the just enacted Massachusetts Parentage Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation which streamlines legal parentage for families using assisted reproduction.
I got a mixed bag of answers, but nothing that quite matched my situation:
- If I had legally transitioned before giving birth, I could have appeared on his birth certificate correctly from the start—but unfortunately, discovering you aren’t a woman doesn’t come with the ability to travel through time.
- If my child had been born in Massachusetts, I could have used the provisions of the Massachusetts Parentage Act to obtain a judgment of parentage.
- If I were a non-gestational, biological parent, I could submit a voluntary acknowledgment of paternity, although these are not available in all states and have not been fully tested in court.
- If my kid were the trans one instead of me, their own name change would be sufficient to change their birth certificate.
- If I were still married to his other parent, I could do a step-parent or second-parent adoption of my spouse’s child.
- If I had transitioned before the divorce, the divorce decree would be sufficient—it’s essentially a court order.
- If I lived in Maryland, or one of seven other states, I could obtain a confirmatory adoption, which produces an adoption order in a case where there is an existing parental relationship, and which has less stringent requirements than other adoptive processes.
LGBTQ family law is a mishmash of case law that varies widely from state to state. Many of those cases are messy, and long, and many of them are extremely sad. Every queer parent I know, every book I’ve read, advises parents to take every single avenue available to them in order to secure their family’s rights and future.
Eventually, I spoke with a family law attorney who specializes in LGBTQ cases, and explained the situation. “You want a co-parent adoption,” she said.
Although my legal status as my child’s parent is not currently in question, an adoption order supercedes a birth certificate, and must be recognized in all US jurisdictions. Even more importantly, it will compel my child’s birth state to amend his birth certificate and seal the original, just like for any adopted child. I was familiar with second-parent adoptions, which are frequently used by queer couples in their family building process, but I’d never heard of them being used in quite this way. I didn’t know that you could adopt a baby you gave birth to. The word “adoption” also felt big and overwhelming in a way I wasn’t fully prepared for. Was this really the best way forward? A few days later, I ran into a former teacher of mine who I knew was personally and professionally familiar with queer family building. I told her I’d just been advised to adopt my own child, and her response was immediate and forceful: “Yes. You should. Yes. You should do that now. You won’t regret it.”
And so my ex-husband and I are adopting our biological child together. Since adoption typically involves a termination of someone’s parental rights, and that’s not what we want, we are co-petitioners in this case. As we gather affidavits of support from our friends and family members, the absurdity of the situation strikes me again and again. I don’t want to be doing this. This is my baby. The evidence of that is permanently written on my body. I didn’t want to spend weeks navigating a complicated courthouse process, or spend thousands of dollars I don’t have hiring an attorney. I don’t want to rely on the goodwill and cooperation of my ex-spouse, although I’m incredibly grateful that I have it. I don’t want the indignity of a background check, or the classist subtext involved in demonstrating that my co-parent and I are upstanding people with “good” jobs. Since my state requires both spouses to appear on an adoption petition, my fiancé and I are delaying our wedding until the adoption is finalized. And maybe I’m being extra-cautious, and everything would have been fine. But in something as critical as the parentage of my child, I would rather be paranoid than sorry.

The language my attorney drafted is authentic and impactful, and the truth of each line resonates deep within me. My son deserves for his birth certificate to reflect his true parentage, yes. He deserves the security of knowing that his relationship to myself and his other father is legally secured, yes. Although my parentage is not in question, due to discriminatory laws in other jurisdictions, my parentage may not be recognized outside of my current state, yes. Since my son already lives with both of us as his biological and legal parents, we can ask the court to waive many of the requirements typically associated with adoption, such as home studies. If we’re lucky, the judge will decide to allow the adoption administratively, and we can even avoid appearing in person in court, an experience that I fear would cause my son additional stress.
As we hurtle ever closer to the second Trump administration, I am often overwhelmed with fatigue and fear about what the next four years will hold. I feel trapped, and I don’t know what to expect. But I’m holding on the things I can control, and the people I love.
[1] Sarah Marshall & Kellie Carter Jackson, You’re Wrong About