PLEASE DON’T ASK, ‘WHO’S THE MUMMY?’

More same-sex couples than ever are having children, but assumptions about such families are frequently out of date and off the mark. LUCY FRY, who recently became a mother with her wife Bella, busts a few myths

Writer Lucy Fry busts myths surrounding same-sex parents

When comedian and television presenter Sandi Toksvig and her then partner Peta conceived their firstborn by artificial insemination some 27-ish years ago, they were trailblazers for the LGBT community; a rare same-sex couple attempting the unparalleled job of bringing up children (three, in fact) in a fundamentally heterosexual world.

Almost three decades later, the familial landscape looks rather different: the latest statistics from Stonewall, the LGBT campaign group, stated that in 2015 there were 21,000 same-sex couples bringing up children in the UK. When I met my partner Bella nine years ago, she was already talking about motherhood (and she very much wanted to carry a child) whereas I was still wary; passionate about my independence and career as a writer, both of which I felt could be jeopardised by kids. It took us a civil partnership (in 2010), five years of make-or-break conversations (I realised that if I truly didn’t want a child then I had to let her go – that her desire for motherhood was more important even than our love) and two further years searching for the right donor and progressing through two pregnancies (including one miscarriage) before our beautiful son Rufus arrived on 21 May. He has brought us unfathomable joy, along with a deepened sense of gratitude that his dreamed-of existence had actually become reality.

During that time we met and talked to a lot of other LGBT parents and discovered that they often found themselves at the receiving end of thoughtless – even if well-meant – comments and queries. Overleaf we explode a few myths…