Queering Babies: Is There No Escape from Narcissists?

Deliberately "queering" the future of babies is wrong, however you spin it

Balazs Boross, a gay man who only wants queer children

I recently waded through the verbiage of a essay entitled “Queering babies: (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy.” Authored by a gay man, Dr. Balazs Boross, who is an Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam; his specialty areas according to the University of Amsterdam website include gender, health and cross-media studies.

I’m guessing that he fancies himself as a bit of an armchair philosopher as well, given the otiose nature of the last sentence in his abstract which reads, “Alluding to the notion of double-liminality, I conclude with the epistemological challenges involved in this informal project and the ontological paradoxes of coexisting in time as babies and parents.” Clearly this man is an acolyte of the Queen of Obscure Rubbish, Judith Butler.

It is also clear that as a self-proclaimed queer person, he is not happy with any identity that is not queer, including his children and furthermore he is also not much of an academic as he has taken his own experience as a complete data set to make his points. (He did eventually ask ten gay couples and ten heterosexual couples to assist him by creating their own baby journals, but he found that overall, they failed to provide him with the information he requested.)

Parents who mistake their children as “Mini-Mes”

The term “mini-me” comes from the name of fictional character in the Austin Power’s film franchise from 1999. Now, mini-me syndrome refers to a type of unconscious, affinity bias where people are favorably inclined towards others they perceive as being like themselves. And in the case of babies, (who are not “like” anyone else), some parents deliberately set out to create children with the attributes that they most like about themselves.

In the case of this father, he has “queered” his perception of his young daughter before she is even old enough to understand that humans only come in two sexes. In a similar fashion that people anthropomorphize their pets, Boross has ascribed to his newborn attributes that she could not have had, even referring to her “artful trick to normalize our relationalities”. As if “normal” is somehow a bad thing that interferes in his choice to be a queer parent.

“Greta just after her birth. Autonomous, stubborn, upset. She needs air around her” Clearly this man knows nothing about babies, or he would not have made such a ridiculous statement. Not to mention violating her privacy through sharing this in a published paper.

Having read up on being a good parent, Baross knew that skin to skin was beneficial for new babies. (One wonders why he didn’t bother to read the bit that would have told him that what babies expect, and need is skin to skin with their birth mothers, not some random dude who had contracted to buy them.)

This didn’t work out well for him because, “Greta was not well-behaved or well- prepared”. He described her as she “impatiently moved towards where she expected to find my breast to suck on”, which he found “somewhat animalistic and perverse, all about unfulfilled desires”. he finishes this section by saying, “And for the first and the last time in our life with Greta, I could not escape from the thought that the situation we had gotten ourselves into with this baby project was just not natural.”

What can one say other than ‘no shit, Sherlock’ to a man who is so willfully oblivious and happy to ignore the needs of a newly born mammal that he has bought to satisfy some want of his own. Using a donor egg in a rented uterus with a plan to immediately remove a newborn infant from her maternal environment that she was programmed to expect is about as unnatural as you can get.

Breastfeeding interfered with his conception of parenting

As this man considers lactation to be a “trope” that “haunt[s] us”, I guess it’s a stretch for him to consider that it’s also “not natural” for him to have denied this baby her right to be breastfed too.

For Baross, his baby’s “attraction to breastfeeding disrupts parental anticipation and evokes feelings of alienation and connotations of the sexual, the notion of queering reminds us that the forces that regulate and produce ‘us’—infants with bodily needs, adults with shifting self-identifications, and corporeal boundaries between these entities—are always in motion.” (NB: I might have an “attraction” to drinking coffee, but if denied this, it would have no material impact on my life, but until the development of modern infant formulas, not being breastfed was a death sentence for a baby so it is hardly a mystery that breastfeeding is so important for them.)

Which is just a fancy way of saying that his feelings were hurt by his baby’s frantic search for a maternal breast. Many dads in heterosexual relationships feel similarly, but their babies aren’t engaged in a futile search because they still have their mothers.

Baby as a project, or who needs a mother?

“I like to watch Greta sleep. Sometimes I wonder if I see her as the most beautiful creature in the world just because I love her or also because of all the choices we made through IVF, from picking the perfect egg donor to finding the perfect uterus and beyond.” So, what happens to these bought babies when they have imperfections, despite the care and money invested in them?

In some cases, the baby is left to die, as in the case of a baby born at 25 weeks so that the surrogate mother could get immediate cancer treatment that could not be delayed. The gay couple who “owned” this baby were not prepared to deal with any imperfections due to prematurity and they also denied this woman the chance to adopt this baby. They ordered the hospital to not do any lifesaving care.

The only way that surrogacy works is by dehumanizing the baby and her biological relatives.

Baross and his partner got a medical report on the donor egg provider (which is just the beginning of pretending that Greta never had any sort of mother), which included information about “her ‘grandfather’—the egg donor’s father” that revealed something about him that led Baross “to think of him as a shaman or a medicine man—which he was not, but it does not matter because even in his capacity as ‘grandfather’ he is entirely fictional.” (Emphasis added)

Baross really resents his friends and acquaintances asking about Greta’s mother. He labels this bit of his essay, “The Unintelligibility of a Motherless Child” and corrects those who ask about any relationship with Greta’s “mother” by pointing out that Greta was created with a donor egg, as if commodifying his baby eliminates any need for any motherly involvement at all. He views any questions as attempts “to normalize [our] domestic configurations”.

Did I mention that this guy identifies as “queer”? Clearly for him, if it can be perceived as ‘normal’, it’s unacceptable.

According to him “genetic links both do and do not matter”. Baross obscures any biological links; “we are both the fathers” and he does not consider their hired surrogate a mother because she has no genetic ties to Greta. Even though this woman (who is only ever referred to as a “surrogate”, never as a woman or a mother), will take to her grave cells from Greta that were exchanged when she was a fetus, as Greta will carry maternal cells from her birth mother because we all do.

Others would disagree that genetic links don’t matter; one of these is Sarah Dingle, the author of “Brave New Humans”, which outlines in stark terms the traumas that can face those born of donor gametes. One review of this book said,

In a profoundly personal way, “Brave New Humans” shines a light on the global fertility business today – a booming and largely unregulated industry that takes a startlingly lax approach to huge ethical concerns, not least our fundamental human need to know who we are, and where we come from.

Denying Greta any opportunity to know her biological family is a profound violation of her human rights, but I guess that the author’s sense of queer is more important to him. Just one more example of a man putting his wants ahead of anyone else’s needs.

Baross rails against the “societal double-standards” he feels are at play when others ask him about his daughter’s origins because, “these questions imply ontological hierarchies between surrogate, adopted and ‘regular’ babies” and he appeals for “reproductive justice” without any acknowledgement that this only works for adults if the needs of babies are ignored entirely.

He also admits that the only time he even thinks about Greta’s “absence of a mother” are “at the pediatrician’s office, where the collection of family history always becomes messy, or at the playground, where it is taken for granted that the mommies are just having a day off.” Greta was born in the USA, where her birth certificate lists both fathers as parents, making the state complicit in an original falsehood. He also notes the problems they encountered in organizing her Dutch birth certificate (needed to establish her Dutch citizenship) because “under Dutch law, it is not possible for a child to have no mother”. To which I can only say that ethically and morally speaking, it should be a crime to legally erase anyone’s mother because without mothers, none of us would be here.

It’s not just his own child he attributes adult thinking to; at Greta’s preschool there is another girl who he describes as her “frenemy” (remembering that these girls are only two or three years old) because this girl “would stand up in front of a group of kids and announce that Greta has no mother, which means that she was not even born and therefore does not exist”. Compounding the perceived breach of the new social contract that means that we must pretend that some children do not have mothers, the parents of this girl were embarrassed into apologizing for their daughter’s lapse, telling the author that she was “confused”, which he does not accept.

This man maintains that a newborn baby is “autonomous” and attributes a two-year-old as acting maliciously out of her sense of “logic”.

Greta’s future: only queer is acceptable

Baross makes a big deal out of the “ostracization and bullying” that both he and his partner faced as gay boys, which was undoubtedly real, but he projects this onto his toddler’s future as a child with two dads. He correctly concludes that she will have “to come to peace with it” but then he goes on to make this extraordinary statement:

“It is actually very similar to being gay, accepting it, and then having the courage to come out.”

Being gay is a sexual orientation, not an identity that is chosen. Discovering that you have been purchased from a catalog and gestated inside a woman with the express purpose of never establishing any sort of motherly bond is absolutely a choice, but not Greta’s. By deliberately creating a baby to satisfy his wants, he has violated a fundamental human right, which is to know where we come from.

And lest a reader thinks that I am projecting my own prejudices onto this author, he spells it out for the reader:

“By referring to his childhood experiences and using the analogy of coming out, he simultaneously prepares for and crafts a queer version of transgenerational continuity. The umbilical cord of trauma shared fate, going back to the primal desire to lactate connect and stay connected.”

When he talks about “Greta’s queered future”, he states, “I often cheat with lullabies and bedtime stories: I replace mothers with fathers” and “In an attempt to be fair and balanced, I do not kill off all the mothers in all the stories.”

Texting a friend (also a gay dad via surrogacy, but his child is a boy), they commiserate with each other about their “failing” toddlers. Liam prefers to play with trucks and “No hard feelings, I understand. Greta is also terrible lately: she has become awfully girly.” Also, in “the case of Liam, it is the child’s ‘own,’ ‘natural’ dispositions that undermine the parental desire for transgression”.

Despite all of the hard work that Baross has put into the project of being a dad, he laments “that the queerness of babies is so hard to access”. Near the end of his essay he states, “As I wrap things up now, I am particularly struck by how little this project has taught me about the babies themselves (something I had secretly hoped for, even though I had previously argued for a focus on queering instead of the queerness of babies).”

This man is so self-absorbed in his queerness that this is the only lens he sees everything through. By projecting a certain queered future on this small human, he limits her potential to forge her own path through normal puberty and circumscribes her choices to what her father approves (and disapproves) of. Not only did this project not teach him anything about babies, but he has also failed to learn any lessons about how we all develop into the adults we become.