Queer families take more shapes than most parishes have had the chance to see up close: married couples who planned for years, single parents by choice, blended families built from a second marriage, foster and kinship families where a niece or a godchild became a daughter long before any paperwork caught up, families built through donor conception, surrogacy, adoption, or a pregnancy that simply arrived, the way it does in any family. What follows is a glimpse into one part of that range, not the whole of it, offered as a beginning to a conversation worth having at far greater length. None of these shapes is more legitimate than another, and none of them owes a parish an explanation before being welcomed into one.
What every one of these families needs from a priest or a staff member is the same thing: don't guess a family's shape from how it looks, and don't guess a child's word for a parent from whatever you assume is standard. Ask, and then use exactly the words you're given.
A kid might call one parent Mama and the other by her first name. A blended family might have a stepfather the child calls Dad and a biological father the child sees twice a year and calls by his first name. None of that needs explaining to the parish, and none of it is the parish's business to ask about unless the family offers it first. Your job is to learn the words a family already uses and use them back, not to work out the logic behind them.
Some families will tell you how they came together without being asked. Donor conception, adoption, surrogacy, a story they've told enough times that it's just part of how they talk about themselves. Other families won't, because the story is ordinary to them, or private, or simply not yours to have. The pastoral task isn't finding out how a family was built. It's treating however it was built as equally unremarkable.
Here's one example: mine. My daughter and I locked eyes for the first time at her moment of birth in a Brooklyn hospital room in the late 2010s. Our daughter was donor-conceived, one part of her story and of how our family came to be. I was the first person to hold her, and that was the moment she made me a mother — not the paperwork that came before and after. A nurse in that same room called me her grandmother more than once, unable to process two women as her parents even after I corrected her. I adopted my own daughter as soon as I could that year. Jen and I married the year after at the courthouse, once the protection was secured federally. We wanted it on paper before anyone had the chance to take it back. The nurse, and the well-meaning people who've since introduced me as "the other mother," were describing what they saw in front of them. I do not believe anyone meant to be cruel. It hit hard anyway, and it didn't feel good in the moment. One sentence asked ahead of time, something as simple as "how would you like me to refer to the two of you?", would have changed both scenes entirely.
Even marriage and legal recognition don't stop many queer parents from also pursuing a second-parent adoption after their child is born. A birth certificate is an administrative record, not a court order, and it doesn't carry the same weight across state lines or in a dispute. Attorneys recommend the adoption as standard practice, even to couples who assume marriage already settled the question.
A priest doesn't need to understand the legal mechanics, and shouldn't attempt to give legal advice. But knowing this is ordinary changes how a family's caution reads. A parent's relief at a baptismal certificate that lists both parents without a fight isn't an overreaction to be talked down from. It's the far side of a fight most straight parents never had to have in the first place.
Donor anonymity is precarious at best.Families choose donor anonymity for many reasons, and those choices should not be treated as evidence of secrecy, discomfort, or denial. My family chose an anonymous donor because legal protections for queer parents were far from secure. I grew up in Virginia at a time when gay and lesbian parents could lose custody of their children because of their sexuality, and that history was not abstract to me when we were building our family. Anonymity felt like one more layer of protection in a legal landscape we had no reason to trust. Consumer DNA testing has since made that protection far less guaranteed, but the reasons families made those choices still deserve to be understood in the context in which they were made. Consumer DNA testing has made it possible for donor-conceived people to identify biological relatives regardless of what a clinic once promised, and a child raised with an "anonymous" donor may find answers years before a parent expected to have that conversation.
Donor-conceived children also need room to understand their own stories without being told what those stories are supposed to mean. A donor may be biologically significant, emotionally significant, both, or neither. A child may feel curiosity, gratitude, anger, indifference, or several of those things at different stages of life. None of those responses threatens the family that raised them. Clergy, teachers, and parishioners should resist assigning meaning from the outside, whether by treating the donor as a “real parent,” dismissing the donor as irrelevant, or assuming the child must feel incomplete. The pastoral task is not to define the relationship for them. It is to make room for the child’s own language, questions, and changing understanding without turning any of it into a judgment on their family.
A kid wondering about a donor, wondering where a talent or a laugh came from, isn't in crisis and isn't confessing a secret. A child’s curiosity is not an invitation for adults to discuss their conception story with other parishioners, teachers, or children. A Sunday school teacher or a nursery volunteer who receives that question the same way they'd receive a mention of a stepparent, without a hushed voice or a startled pause, does that family a real service.
Colorado is currently the only state that has banned anonymous sperm and egg donation outright. Everywhere else, "anonymous" is still sold as an option, but a growing number of clinics now specify that the term only means the clinic itself won't release the donor's identity, not that a DNA test cannot identify the donor.
Underneath all of this is one thing to avoid: treating any part of a family's structure or story as something owed to you as explanation.
The posture throughout should match what the rest of this site asks of every welcome: recognition, not scrutiny.
No family should have to justify its shape to be welcomed into our houses of worship.
Mine is only one story, not the whole of it. Every family described here, and plenty not described here, would tell this differently, and no single piece can hold the entire range. What holds across all of it is simpler than any one story: we are families, and we deserve the love and respect any family is owed. What we choose to share about how we came to be is our business, the same as it would be for the family in the next pew.
Some of what's here, the adoption, the caution built into forms and language, reflects a real legal backdrop for many of us, though not a daily reality for every family in this range. That backdrop is genuinely active right now, not just theoretically unsettled. Advocacy groups are tracking hundreds of bills moving through state legislatures this year that touch queer families directly, healthcare, schooling, the basic paperwork a family needs to function,1 and a striking number of them trace back to the same handful of conservative Christian legal organizations circulating near-identical model legislation from state to state.2 Most of these bills still fail; advocates defeat the large majority of what gets introduced.3* But the volume and the coordination behind it are real, and a parish that wants to offer genuine welcome should know that.
Some of the loudest voices behind that legislation speak in explicitly Christian terms. That's not comfortable to sit with from inside a church, and it shouldn't be. The most honest answer a parish has is the same one this whole piece has been asking for: love a family doesn't have to earn, offered by the same faith that's been turned against them elsewhere.
If you're part of a queer family and some piece of this rang true, or if I missed something entirely, I want to hear about it. This strategy should hold more voices than mine, and it will, as more families are willing to share theirs.
1 ACLU, “Legislative Attacks on LGBTQ Rights,” 2026 tracker. aclu.org
2 Prism Reports, “Anti-transgender legislation accelerates in early 2026,” February 9, 2026, citing Logan Casey, Director of Policy Research, Movement Advancement Project. prismreports.org
3 Movement Advancement Project, “Reflecting Forward: Learnings from the 2025 Legislative Sessions,” 2025. On average, MAP reports advocates have defeated 92% of anti-LGBTQ bills introduced each year over the past 15 years.* lgbtmap.medium.com
* That 92% is a 15-year average, not a guarantee. MAP's own accounting puts 2025's actual rate at 88%, the lowest of recent years. The average holds only because people keep showing up to defeat these bills session after session, not on its own.