Happy Ho-Hum Families Day

Today is LGBTQ Families Day, a day which one celebrates by having a day just like any other. Over at Mombian, there’s a list of blog posts written in celebration of this day, and it seems to me that, taken as a whole, the point is very humdrum: LGBTQ families are just like any other kind of family. I don’t mean this in a sweeping, romantic, love-is-love sort of way. I mean this in a much more mundane way. My kid is LGBTQ, but that’s much less pressing than her being a kid. She necessitates getting up at six every morning, planning and executing a gajillion meals and snacks every day, doing a gajillion loads of laundry every week, making a gajillion trips to the grocery store/library/playground/park, fighting over math homework, fighting over dessert, undergoing relentless interrogation, and deleting without even reading emails about last-minute saver fares to Reykjavic and Hawaii. This is what having an eight-year-old is like for everyone who has an eight-year-old. That she’s also trans is usually secondary. Kids are kids first: you’re desperately in love with them and also constantly wondering why they must be such a pain in the ass. This would be weird if they weren’t a) kids and b) yours. Since they’re both, that odd balance is perfectly ordinary. 

Never mind anger, never mind fairness, never mind notions of rightness and equality, what I find most endlessly puzzling about movements to deny LGBTQ rights is simply this: Why???? Every day, my family is nothing so much as utterly, boringly, wonderfully, maddeningly exactly like yours. I’d write more, but I have to go fold laundry now.