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The problem with Gayby

By on January 24, 2013

A soon to be released movie documenting the lives of children born to same-sex parents titled Gayby Baby has not only made me a bit clucky but it’s also pushed a new word into the popular lexicon – Gayby. As the doco’s name and subject matter suggests, a gayby is a child who has two dads or two mums.

At first I thought it was just a cute and harmless play on words but then I began thinking about it more and had to ask myself ‘do I want my child to be known as a ‘gayby’?

The documentary itself asks the question, “are they [gaybies] somehow different to other kids?”

The word itself is ‘othering’ and I can picture a child coming home asking his/her same-sex parents why kids at school were calling them a ‘gayby’. They’d have to explain that because of their different circumstances this name applies.

Urban Dictionary even lists the word as, “A term used to insult someone who either acts gay, or has gay parents.”

While I’m usually of the persuasion that ‘different words take on different meanings for different people,” when it comes to this word I see no good coming from it.

The whole debate around same-sex parents having children is one where our community has to, unfortunately, prove to society that a child growing up with same-sex parents won’t be any different or disadvantaged to a child living in an opposite-gender household.

Yet here we are openly using and adopting a word that does just the opposite, it instantly says that from the moment a child is conceived to two same-sex parents it isn’t a normal baby, it’s something very different, it’s a gayby.

About Jesse Matheson

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