Building LGBTQ Families (with Abbie E. Goldberg)

With the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, queer families are more visible today than ever. But the path to becoming a parent is complicated for LGBTQ people. 

Dr. Abbie E. Goldberg, psychologist and researcher, provides LGBTQ parents and prospective parents with the detailed, evidence‑based knowledge they need to navigate the transition to parenthood and help their children thrive. Her evidence-based research can benefit all families. 

 

Transcript

 

ABBIE GOLDBERG: For me, it would have been a light bulb even to see one LGBT family and to know this was something that was real, and this was happening. But it wasn't being talked about. And the invalidation those families face is heartbreaking to me because it doesn't have to be this way. Everyone's families can be recognized as valid. We don't have to demonize certain kinds of families.

BLAIR HODGES: Back in the 1980s, when young Abbie Goldberg's divorced mom struck up a romantic relationship with a woman, Abbie didn't have any models to look to, no vocabulary to help her understand or feel understood in this queer configuration.  

Today, Abbie is a clinical psychologist and an internationally recognized scholar of LGBTQ families. She's become an expert on queer families—especially the practical and legal obstacles they face, as well as the strengths they bring to the entire family-making enterprise. In this episode, Abbie E. Goldberg joins us to talk about her new book, LGBTQ Family Building: A Guide for Prospective Parents.

There are many ways to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

 

MAKING FAMILIES VISIBLE – 1:43

 

BLAIR HODGES: Abbie E. Goldberg joins us today on Family Proclamations. Abbie, it's really great to have you on the show.

ABBIE GOLDBERG:  Thank you so much for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: You've done decades of research, you've written a lot of journal articles, a lot of books and academic work about LGBTQ families. What inspired you to write about this topic and to research this as your career?

ABBIE GOLDBERG: I'm going to go way back. I was raised in a queer parent family myself in the eighties, mostly in the suburbs of New York. I did not see my family represented in most media depictions of families and most of what we were reading about families in school. I grew up thinking a lot about what families are visible and what families are invisible. I was always really passionate about trying to understand and to make visible different kinds of families.

BLAIR HODGES: Wow. That was well before, obviously, the legalization of same-sex marriage. What was that like for you? Were you only child? Siblings? What was the family like?

ABBIE GOLDBERG: I have two brothers, one much older than me and one younger. We experienced our heterosexual parent's relationship dissolution at different times in our life. So it shaped us, I think, in different ways. Our family from the outside looked pretty typical, like a divorced family. On the inside, my mother was partnered with a woman. That was really not something most people knew. It was only something we started talking about when I went to college, maybe late in high school. A few people knew, but it was mostly a secret.

I thought a lot about that over the last couple of decades, about how keeping those kinds of secrets—when there's really nothing wrong with your family as it is, it's that it's just not accepted in the broader society—how that can shape kids.

BLAIR HODGES: That makes me think of two things. One, the fact that there’s been a sea change here in your own lifetime, you're a part of a big change in visibility for families. Also, the fact that families like this have always existed in some way, or people have always been experiencing feelings in love, and trying to make that work in a society that hasn't always been accepting.

The work you're doing for prospective parents in this book is really valuable. In a way your own family was pioneering things, and now you as a scholar are a pioneer in helping move that along. I didn't know that about you before I set up the interview. That's really fascinating.

ABBIE GOLDBERG: Thank you. Oprah Daily did an interesting piece profiling my work and how my personal life influenced me and a little bit about my trajectory. It's a fun piece. It's done by a wonderful New York Times reporter I've worked with over the years and who I trusted enough to tell my story. It gives a little bit more detail.

 

GETTING PERSONAL – 4:26

 

BLAIR HODGES: Say a little bit more about that "trusted enough," because obviously this is a reall