In this episode our host Amelia Phillips takes us on a journey to how she started her career in health. She shares her highs and lows, including a struggle in her late teens. She also shares some of her biggest learnings in her 24 years in health (and how to navigate with kids!), plus what actionable, easy steps we can take to leading a healthier life for us and our kids.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
A little while ago, I was in the playground and struck up a lovely conversation with the doubt of a little girl. Now you know how these conversations go. How’s the weather? How old is your daughter? Oh, mine too. What preschool does she go to? Oh, I’ve heard great things about that preschool, and as the conversation went on, I completely miss any cues.
Dad was gay. He was even using words like my partner this, my partner that, But it wasn’t until he actually referred to his partner by his name James that I clicked. And by that point, my reaction and then his reaction to my reaction made me realize that he’s been here before. He’s witnessed people like me handling the entire situation badly.
This is Healthy Her with Amelia Phillips. If you like me, wanna understand the world of same sex parenting, the challenges, the rewards, and also the awkward traps us hetero parents fall into in the playground or dinner party. Then you’ve come to the right place because there shouldn’t be awkward, and I don’t know why it sometimes is.
Sean Z Zips is a podcaster, presenter, and content creator. He’s also the husband to Josh Zips, who you’ve heard on the ABC Drive program, as well as on the Joe Rogan podcast. He’s a proud father to Twin Toddlers, Stellar and Cooper, and he’s currently the host of Listeners Come Out Wherever you are, a podcast about people’s coming out experiences, and he’s also co-hosted Mama Me’s Parenting podcast, The baby.
Sean’s here to tell it to us straight or tell us straights how it is, . Anyway, Sean, thanks so much for coming on and coming out today. Thank you for having me. You know, in your podcast, which I absolutely love, It’s called Come out wherever you are, and you explain that coming out actually doesn’t happen just the one time.
It happens multiple times. And I imagine in the parenting sphere that also happens all the time. Do you get a little bit sick of having to tell the whole story to strangers? Absolutely. I mean, I guess if I’m being completely honest with you, when you’re a queer person living in this world, especially as a parent, you’re not naive to the fact that you are a minority.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. According to the most recent census, the Australian one that we have all that data filled out for, which is 2011, there was only 33,700 same sex couples in Australia. Yeah. And even though that’s a rise of 32% since 2006, Which is a hefty rise. Yeah. When you think about that chunk of people, that 33,000 people spread across an entire country, it’s not extremely likely that you know a handful of queer parents.
And so like any minority, the reality is, is you’re confronted with the majority on a day-to-day basis. And so when you wake up in the morning and you go outside of your house, you know that it’s a potential. You’re gonna have that conversation. And when you’re a parent, you know, you know that with confidence that it’s going to come.
And it’s not just at the playground like you’ve just discussed. Those are usually easier conversations to have cuz it’s more casual. And you also get to dictate the conversation a little bit. You can decide how much you want to divulge. You can also decide to lie and just move on with your life. You can pretend you’re single or that you have a wife at home.
Yeah, it totally depends on how you wake up and whether or not you’re willing to be an advocate that day. But what I think is more compelling or interesting, The moments where you’re not actually able to self-identify due to an uncomfortable situation. So maybe you’re filling out a form at a new daycare and it doesn’t actually have a spot for another husband.
Instead it says wife or husband, or you are in a more formal interview scenario or situation. Yeah. And the person interviewing you asks a question and you might be uncom. So I guess the overall answer is each day you wake up and you have to choose, is today the day I’m gonna be an advocate for our community, or do I just want to be a regular person who doesn’t get asked questions about their life?
It’s funny because I think of you and Josh and you two very different people. I mean with you, Sean, we love you to pieces and you’ve got some relatively strong gay signals. I mean, today you’re just in a, you. Lovely blue and white striped shirt, but I do have a scar on you. Oh, there you go. Ok. I see this gut.
Usually you’re a little more loud and proud. Josh isn’t like that at all. And you like, you could not tell that Josh was gay. He, he’s got very fews. Signals. So I imagine it does get awkward in situations where people don’t know how much to pry. And I guess I’m asking you, because I am one of those super curious people that tends to keep asking the questions, Is there a safe amount of prying?
Or to your point earlier, does it depend on what mood you are in that day? It totally depends on the person. I know a lot of queer people who feel very uncomfortable with their truth, and that’s based off of their own individual trauma. And I know a lot of queer people who don’t feel that it’s appropriate to pry.
They feel that it’s unjust a little bit, that single mothers don’t ever really get asked where their husbands are. So why are you asking where my wife. Those types of people exist and they exist all around the world, whether they’re heterosexual or homosexual. That being said, it’s Josh and my job. We live in the media space.
We work in the media space. We set out to share our truth with as many people as possible. My goal, my literal goal, why I feel I’m on Earth mm-hmm. is to be an active. Of weaving the G T Q I plus parenting experience into the fabric of the Australian landscape. And so when people ask questions or they’re uncomfortable or they pry every single day, I show up and I try my very best to do so.
And educate them in a warm and understanding manner. There’s really nothing you can say to me that will make me uncomfortable. But you better be worried that I might make you uncomfortable, cuz I’m gonna speak my truth and I’m gonna let you know if you’re making me feel uncomfortable. , oh my God, I literally just got goosebumps cuz I’m like, we are so in the right.
Space here, because I wanna pry, Can I ask you all the questions that I wanna ask those dads in the playground that I think, Oh, should I ask that question? I don’t know. Oh, so , No, please do it. , you’re open and willing. All right. Well first of all, let’s start at the beginning. How far into your relationship with Josh.
Did the conversation about having kids come up Probably on our third or fourth date, like pretty fast. Oh, wow. Um, I remember we were sitting at a bar in New York City, one of those ones that like looks out onto the street and I saw some child, either the child was getting yelled at by the mom, or the mom was frustrated.
And I made some joke about loving kids, like, Oh, I just love kids. And Josh said, Do you wanna have them one day? And I was like, No, absolutely not. That’s disgusting. Leave that to the straights, . It took me a r. Literally, you guys can breed and we will sit and drink cocktails. Like that was my fantasy life.
It took a really long time for me to unpack how much internalized homophobia existed inside of me, how high those walls were built up around me. What do you mean by internalized homophobia? I don’t get. When you live in a homophobic environment, which obviously happens to be the society that we live in, it gets better and better every year and every decade.
But growing up in the eighties and nineties, still quite a homophobic place. Where were you by the way? Like where were you living? I lived outside of Boston in quite a small town in in New Hampshire. My neighborhood was by no means homophobic. And to be honest, the state is not, but you still live, you know, under a bush presidency, or you’re still living in a predominantly divided nation.
Similar to Australia, it’s very left versus right on every issue that matters. And even think about the last couple of years I moved to this country and the second week I lived here, the Pueblo site vote occurred. Mm. And so you’re living in an environment where it’s quite clear not, not everyone agrees with who you are and when you live in a world that is predominantly heterosexual, specifically in the parenting space.
Yeah. What happens is you build up walls and those walls tell you you are less than you are not deserve. To be a good parent, you must be in a relationship of a man and a woman, and therefore that is not something that you deserve. That is not something that you should be allowed to do. That is so hard when as a heterosexual person, there’s so many walls that you build up about being a bad parent in that world.
I can’t imagine a whole other layer on top of that just about, will I be a good parent? Am I cut out for this? But then you had that extra layer as well. That’s a. Yeah, you have to kind of like fight your way to the table. Mm. I think it’s really hard for most people to understand that it really wasn’t until the seventies that a homosexual couple fought for rights and won in the United States.
There were obviously gay people who were parents, but the only way to do that, all the way up really until the nineties was to be in a heterosexual fake relationship. Established and built off lies. Yeah. Have a divorce and then somehow miraculously in the. Win the ability to see your children. That is how gay people parented.
And of course, into the eighties and nineties, you start to see people adopting and then of course surrogacy even later than that. Yeah. But still the framework, the foundation of what it meant to be a parent was just heterosexual. When I’m talking about those cases, I’m talking about one or two, right?
Like one in 19. Six and then another in 1978. So there just weren’t examples to grab onto. Yeah. And so you can imagine that if you’re a young person, your synapses are forming, you’re becoming a human, you’re becoming an adult, you’re understanding the world. There’s this sliver, there’s this slice in all of us that says, that’s not for gay people.
Right. And that’s where you were with Josh that day. Like, No, let’s leave it to the straights. And then, so how did you guys get around to wanting kids and taking that big. I was really lucky that I was raised in an environment that kind of accepted who I was and praised me, never made me feel different.
And so that has put inside of me and my husband cuz he was raised in a similar environment. Stubbornness. Stubbornness, that we are completely normal. We deserve everything that we want. And so a lot of women will understand this, but when I fell in love with Josh, something happened inside of me. Yeah.
Wanted desperately to be a part of him. Yeah. In a way that was more than just dating. Yeah. I had this urge to take his last name. I had an urge to continue the family tree. I had this obsession with making something with him, with taking our relationship to that next level. Yeah. That’s beautiful. And so it’s funny.
He changed his mind. He, So just back to that New York story, he told me that day, I want children. I told him I didn’t. Oh, wow. And then over the course of two years, yeah, we basically switched. So Josh was like, Well, if I wanna be with this person, kids aren’t on my cards. And he came to terms with the fact that I was enough.
And then over the course of those same years, I completely changed my mind and said I. To parent with you, like, I want to watch you become a father. I want to have children that are yours and mine. And so we had to kind of work through that. But we ended up meeting at the same really exactly when we got married.
We came to the same agreement that that was a journey we wanted to pursue together. And then what about the sheer logistics of it? Adoption, surrogacy Operation Turkey based star, I, I , I had a deal with my gorgeous friend Craig, that if I was 35 and still single, I loved Craig’s pieces. I was desperately trying to, you know, marry him and uh, and say, Are you sure you’re gay?
Could wish. I said, So. We had this agreement that if we’re both single and 35, we’re gonna do Operation Turkey based. I said, Please, can I just. Can we have a crack anyways? Like not, not going there, Turkey based stock. I’m like, Okay, we’ll do that. We’ll do that. , We did not pursue the Turkey based route. at the time when we were looking to get married.
Uh, it still wasn’t legal in every state in America or in Australia to be married, let alone have children. And so we were still kind of just like floating through life. On our own little timeline. And so for us it was like, well, we wanna be together forever, so it doesn’t matter if our state doesn’t allow it yet.
And then as soon as we got engaged, New York legalized same sex marriage and around the same time as if God or whoever is up above ala. Knew that we wanted to have children. All of a sudden, the media landscape starts to share new options. So in the early and mid two thousands, adoption for same sex couples is the predominant option available.
Mm-hmm. , I think the average person, if you had asked even a heterosexual. Same sex people have children, they probably would’ve said just adoption. Okay. Fostering was another option. But I had heard of many same-sex couples who had been burnt emotionally by the process of falling in love with the child only to lose that child to their biological parents.
I’ve heard that too. Yeah. It’s so sad. And so for us, we thought, Okay, well adoptions are only option, so that’s what we’ll do. So we started to go to adoption meetings in New York. We were just Googling around and finding sessions and looking for adoption agencies that specialize in same sex couples because obviously there are a lot of unique situations and scenarios that need to be navigated both legally, emotionally, and then I guess just literally physically, Yeah, around that exact same time, I logged onto Facebook and I saw that one of my college friends was pregnant, and I was like, Oh, that’s cool.
I’ll double tap it. Give it a little like, and I start to read the post and it says, I’m. But not with my husband’s child. And I was like, What is going on here? And in the post, she educates us all to the fact that she’s a surrogate and that she’s carrying a child for a gay man in Russia, I believe. Wow. And honestly, my mind was blown.
I had no. I had literally no idea I had made it that far in life and had a 0% idea that surrogacy was a thing. Is that right? I had literally no idea. I couldn’t even fathom it. I hadn’t even considered ivf. I mean, I knew that it existed. Yeah, because I had read an article, I think in the New York Times.
Mm-hmm. . So in that one moment, I just messaged her right away. We were definitely close enough and we basically established a year-long relationship where she offered to carry our children while also educating me about the surrogacy experience. She ended up not carrying our. But that relationship, that one Facebook post changed the trajectory of my entire life because in that moment, I became quite obsessed with the potential of having a child with my husband.
Yep. And, and I think the with is the really important word here, right? Most gay couples, same-sex couples are forced to have one of the parents be biological, and then the other one ah, takes a vaccine. So that’s why you were thinking. Twin scenario where you could potentially do ivf, you know, Josh’s sperm with one, yours, with another, and then carry, uh, carry these two surrogate surrogate babies together as twins.
That was the initial thought process is that one of the kids would be mine and one would be Josh’s. Mm-hmm. . So what I did was I started googling around and I found an article and it was from Australia, ah, weirdly enough, long before this was my country, uh, that I lived in. But um, it said Australian sister donates eggs.
To gay brother and uses the sperm of gay brothers partner. Oh, I get that. Yes. Okay. Oh wow. Yeah, and so my mind, I already had gone through this like emotional rollercoaster of discovering that this might be an option for me. Yeah. That’s pretty crazy. And then all of a sudden I’m learning that. There’s a way for you to receive eggs from any donor, but that that donor could be related to you and because of biological makeup of cousins and sisters and mothers and aunts.
Yeah. You know that that family tree would really be able to continue and listen. I’m sure if any queer people are listening to this, there are a lot of gay people who struggle with this idea of kind of tacking the system. Why go through the process, the financial burden of going through surrogacy? To be so ego driven that you need children of your own when there are children all around the world who need happy homes.
Yeah. And I do not disagree with that, but in that moment. Yeah, that’s a fair point. Yeah, it’s a completely fair point. But in that moment, for better or for worse, I had made up my mind that my entire life, and I’m gonna definitely get emotional. Sorry. Cool. My entire life. Felt different my entire life. I’ve been made to feel less than my entire life.
I’ve been told you can’t have everything else that everyone gets, and it has a huge traumatic impact on you as a young person growing up in this world, especially someone who really wanted to be a dad who really felt that I had a lot to offer and a lot of love to give. Yeah. And in that moment, I thought, Wait a second.
Maybe it’s possible. Maybe I can have the quote, normal life that I always wanted. Maybe I’ll be able to look at my child and see myself, but also see my partner. What a miraculous, beautiful evolution. What an amazing gift. Technologically, you know, how what, how, what a beautiful gift that science could potentially give to, to people who are privileged enough to afford it.
And so that article, that like random ass Australian article, I don’t even know who those people are, but I need to track them down and thank them. That became kind of the itch. So what I did was I started to educate everyone around me. Anyone who would listen, I would force them to think about it. And that meant that I talked to every female member of my family and all of my closest girlfriends.
I have a lot of female members. I have really close cousins, sisters, aunts, mother, like everyone who was of. Able age who could potentially donate eggs. I was educating them, sending articles, letting them know that this was something I was considering.
And so where did you end up? Where did you end up? Uh, with your beautiful, stellar and Cooper. This is Stella and Cooper’s story as much as it’s my own. And even though I’m a media personality, I’m not naive to the fact that the nuances of their life are greatly affected by the stories that Josh and I tell.
And so we never have spoken publicly about who the donor is, but what we’re comfortable saying is that she’s a female member of my family. We got a phone call on New Year’s Eve about a year after the journey began, and she said, I’d like to donate my eggs as a gift to you. And then obviously, as soon as that phone call came through, six days later, we emailed the surrogacy agency.
14 days later, we had our first call. 31 days later we had our second follow up call. Two months later, we signed with the agency. Three months later, the egg. Traction and the sperm donation had occurred. We were paired with the surrogate, so that was all in March, and by September we had two children. Oh my goodness.
So an egg from a family member, sperm from each of you. No, Just my husband. Oh yeah, we, we don’t wanna get put my sperm and a female. Oh yeah. That would not be good. Not good. Ok. That’s, that’s why I’m not in that world. . I would make bad decisions. Of course. Of course. Just George and then, Separate surrogate carrier.
Yep. So the surrogate was paired with us, um, through an agency. We, the agency’s philosophy was that you only get paired once, so they basically take 1% of women. They go through psychological assessments, we go through psychological assessments. These women need to have had all full pregnancies to term no C-sections, and no desire to extend their family further.
We got on the phone with our surrogate and her husband. All three of her children. And it was clear right away that there was a bond. They were interested in having a lifelong relationship with the children and we were interested in our children having access to all of the information and all of the truth.
And so on that phone call, we both hung up and within probably six minutes we were notified from the agency that both of us had said yes. That’s incredible. Can I ask a question? Why did you, when you had that strong urge to kind of see your. Expressed, were you not more tempted to take your sperm and Josh’s sperm and then a donor egg from a non-related person?
It’s definitely. It brings me back to the story of falling in love with Josh and I. I know that this is the truth for many women. Not for all, but for many because so many of my girlfriends can relate, but it was a specific desire to do it. With Josh, I wanted to look into a child’s eyes and see both of us.
I wanted selfishly. I want, I wanted this journey for us. I felt like it was the next step in our relationship, and so of course, we could have adopted, and I would’ve loved those children with every ounce of me. I never would’ve questioned for a second that I was not the real father and that they were my real children.
But there was that small little thing inside of me that said, if this is an option for you and you’re willing to pursue it, and you can financially afford it, Then you should go through the process and try at least give it a chance so you can have that experience. Cuz I just don’t think that most people understand that When your children come home to you and they say, Hey mommy, can you help me fill out a family tree?
That’s something you have access to and a lot of people don’t. In my community, that’s just an option that will never occur for them and it doesn’t make them less than parents at all. But there was just a part of me that really wanted to try to see if that was possible. Cuz when my children say, Tell me a story.
My grandmother. We can give all those answers. It’s our children. And you know, ultimately this is a choice that, you know, it’s wonderful that we have that choice. And hetero couples are the same. If they’re, you know, having fertility issues, they exactly have to, you know, at some point make a choice. Or some of them don’t have the choice when IVF isn’t working.
I wanna touch on something you mentioned a moment ago. You said that. Than parent, and also at the start of our chat that, you know, internalized homophobia. In researching our conversation today, I came across a US podcast episode and it was titled, Children Have the Right to a Mom and a Dad. Mm-hmm. and Katie Faust said, The biological differences between a man and a woman is integral to kids’ development, as well as being raised by a married couple to ensure proper develop.
I fell off my chair cuz that was a recent podcast episode. This isn’t something from the seventies. This is recent. Now that you are settled in Australia, but you are American, what differences have you noticed in both countries? Acceptance of same sex parents and like when you hear a episode title like that, I mean, What do you think about that?
I mean, my first reaction is, Welcome to my life. This is unfortunately just kind of the reality of what it means to be a queer person, let alone a queer parent. Surely most people don’t think that way. Most people don’t think that way. In the spheres and in the cities and in the jobs that Josh and I choose to work in, right?
We’re blessed enough to live in a creative left leaning. Bustling metropolis, that is Sydney. And we’ve only ever lived in big cities, Los Angeles, New York City. We’re making active choices to surround ourselves with colleagues. We work, we both work in creative environments, right? But we’re actively choosing that, right?
We’re not living in the bush, we’re not living in Alabama or South Carolina. We are avoiding. Homophobic or right leaning places where same sex marriage and same sex parenting is not just thought of as a sin, but it just downright picketed. And there is 100% a constant barrage of negative press around our, I guess I, I was gonna say make it about parenting, but it’s.
Bigger than that. It’s just our right to live. There are many people who just don’t think that we should exist at all. And so hearing a headline like that or, or getting comments like that, remember, I’m a content creator, right? I make a living on Instagram, so I receive a whole heck of a lot of negativity from trolls.
Do you? Yeah. Who just find me because my, you know, my Instagram handle says Proud gay parent, and I’m. On podcasts and on radio, and sometimes on tv. Mm-hmm. . So they’ll find you. They 100% will. And so I just don’t live in a world where I’m naive to the fact that people think that way. But more specifically to that article.
More specifically to that, because yeah, she has also been pushed in multiple post interviews about why she said what she said and what she means. And the truth is, for the longest time we have believed, and I mean this as a larger human society, that anyone who is not a white straight couple, So I’m talking for a while.
We believed in this country that people of color were unfit to be parents for a while. We believe that single fathers should not be allowed because they weren’t capable of handling the parenting juggle. We have always challenged as a society what we don’t know, and we’re quite obsessed with focusing on what the children will be missing, but it’s always through the lens of our adult prejudice.
It’s always through the lens of our own set of beliefs, and it is true. That children are handed a unique set of circumstances, a unique set of obstacles when they have same sex parents. I will not disagree with that, but I also believe that parents, that children of divorced parents of alcoholics, parents with depression or death are also handed a unique set of obstacles that they have to power through in life.
There are so many people. Born every single day from heterosexual couples who are challenged on a daily basis to survive, let alone thrive. Absolutely. Right. That nucleus family, that sort of white picket fence nucleus family has been, you know, disappearing. There’s been so many different accommodations of families, and some of them functional.
Some of them dysfunctional. Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with. So when I hear things like that, I’m reminded of one thing, the real dirty truth that I think people are uncomfortable dealing with. And by people I usually mean religious, right? Cuz they seem to struggle the most with homosexual couples having children.
The truth is, children need love. That is what they need, and that’s the most important thing because all the hurdles that they’re thrown their way, their ability to be resilient, their ability to thrive, their ability to feel safe in their home, all of that comes down to providing. Love and Josh and I have it in bucket loads.
It’s all we want to do is give the best life possible to our children. And I know many, many, many heterosexual couples who are not capable or willing to give that. Yep. So has there been research studies done? Yes. Saying that homosexual couples are less likely to provide a sound environment for young children.
Sure. Do I believe that a lot of those tests are invalid? Yeah, I do. I was a statistician and a strategist, and I’ve looked into it, and I’m well aware that oftentimes they’re looking at sample sizes that are a little misguided. It’s not large population sample. They’re going specifically to people who are.
Looking for money and who are found in a specific group of people who might be struggling. Yeah, I’ve always struggled a little bit with that, but I’m actually not so interested in a couple studies that pinpoint issues because if through the lens of that. We might as well go back to the sixties and say that people of color are aboriginals aren’t fit to be parents, and I’m not willing to do that.
Mm. Well it’s funny, in researching this episode, I did do a deep dive in all the studies out there. There are lots and a lot of them are really flawed, but what I was very pleased was, was the, uh, most recent meta-analysis. And for those listening and meta-analysis is a study of all the studies put together and they adjust for different factors in them.
So they’re, you know, gold standard studies. And this meta-analysis concluded that the research does not support the assertion that children need, both I am male and female parent to achieve a healthy, well balanced adulthood. And that’s the like mic drop. Exactly. Amen. Moment guys, like put all this. Put your prejudices aside.
And I think to your point, Sean, that you know, kids need love and they need stability. And you guys, as much as all of us can provide that, and we try our hardest, and I think that’s the overarching message that I really wanna get across here. And I hope that the Katie Faus of the world start to shut.
Exactly. You know what I would like her to do and everyone on the right is just take all that energy and frustration, which I do not judge. I completely understand that everyone comes into the world with their own unique set of skills, tool belts that they’re given at when their children to help them shape their belief system.
We’re all indoctrinated with our own thoughts and feelings from our parents and our grandparents and the society at. But I’d like us to just take that frustration if it’s really all about the kids. And how about we educate all young people about the reality of the human experience. And the reality is gay people exist and the reality is they’re having children.
And the reality is there are people who look and feel different all around the world who are parenting. And the sooner we can tell young people that these are all the different options that are available to you, and that we can create empathy, focus on educating about empathy and love and understanding and respect, that’s.
The energy and frustration I want her to have. Go on tv, go on the abc, go on q and a and scream loudly about a lack of empathy and the fact that that’s coming from parents. That’s the focus I want. You’re looking at me and saying, Your children are worse off. I’m looking at you and wondering how you’re raising your children.
I’m looking at her and going, What example are you showing for your children? I’m a little more worried and concerned about them because if they’re gay, that’s setting them up for a lifetime of failure. That’s the frustration that I live. Well, finally, Sean, for us hetero parents who don’t meet that many gay parents, unfortunately out there, what is a parting message for us hetero parents, when we do bump into you at school in the playground, and we strike up that conversation, how can we best support you guys to feeling included and absolutely worthy in this?
Oh, it’s such a good question and I appreciate that approach. The truth is, I share my life online, the parenting experience every single day. And there are quite a lot of us online doing the same thing. And the one piece of feedback I get on the most frequent basis, the types of messages I receive are women saying, I’m so shocked at how similar our experiences are.
I’m so shocked that everything you’re going through, I’ve gone through too. Now obviously, I, I couldn’t have carried my children, obviously, I didn’t breastfeed my children. So in the beginning of the experience there is quite naturally and. A divide that is understandable. Mm-hmm. . But after your children stop breastfeeding and they’re just humans on earth, they don’t go easier on you cuz you’re straight or gay.
They don’t need less nappy changing or less food. They don’t watch Bluey any less. They don’t have to go to a special daycare. They just are children. Looking up into their parents’ eyes without an understanding of what’s right or wrong, or majority a minority, and they just need love from them. And so the experiences that I have every single day are exactly like yours in every way.
Of course, there’s nuances, and the nuances are that they’re. That I have a privilege of being a white man, and therefore society treats me a little bit differently than they even treat a white woman. That there’s less societal pressure to juggle everything that a woman has versus a man. Of course, all of those things are true, but if we’re thinking largely just about what it means to be a same sex partner, The experience of parenting is the same.
So what I often say is the questions that you have usually are a little off. Like the, the questions that I get on a frequent basis. Is it so much harder being a gay parent? Are you worried about your children? Like at what point are you gonna educate them? Are you worried about bullies? Yeah, of course I am, but.
I was raised by heterosexual parents and they had to deal with me being bullied for being gay. Like we all come from somewhere, right? It’s just a continuation of stress and the natural fears of parenthood. And so I think when you see me at the playground, I’m probably dealing with the same thing you’re dealing with.
I also survived a pandemic while parenting my children. I also have to juggle work in life. I also have to juggle having friends and working out, and the stresses of my child not being potty trained by a specific developmental milestone. Of it is the same. The only thing I would say is the only way we’re gonna make the world a better place is through education.
You can’t be yourself if you can’t see yourself. And so there needs to be more queer people out there in the world answering questions. And so if you see me and you have questions, ask them, Just do it with kindness and empathy. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable being asked that question, then just don’t ask it.
Sean, such an amazing, fascinating chat today. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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