Making space for the truth of family diversity.

I just read a lovely story penned by Jennifer Finney Boylan in The New York Times titled 'Maddy' Just Might Work After All. An excerpt:

[M]y two children and my wife and I were sitting around the kitchen table, eating dinner. I was mid-transition. My older son, Zach, gave me a look.
“What,” I said. He was 7.
“We can’t keep calling you ‘Daddy,’ ” he said. “If you’re going to be a girl. It’s too weird.” ...
“Well,” I said to my sons. “My new name is Jenny. You could call me Jenny.”
Zach laughed derisively. “Jenny? That’s the name you’d give a lady mule.”
I tried not to be hurt. “O.K., fine. What do you want to call me?”...
“I know,” he said. “Let’s call you Maddy. That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy. And anyhow, I know a girl at school named Maddy. She’s pretty nice.”
His younger brother, Sean, who was 5, said, “Or Dommy.’
We all laughed. Even Sean. Dommy! What a dumb name for a transsexual parent!
After the hilarity died down, I nodded. “Maddy might work,” I said.

I spend a lot of time with kids, and one thing I am frequently reminded of is the beautiful diversity of who makes up our families and the strength that we draw from those foundations.

A year or more ago I saw a wonderful traveling exhibit called Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People and their Families. (On a side note, the exhibit was sponsored by a church - the Berry United Methodist Church in Chicago, a reconciling congregation and proud member and supporter of the Reconciling Ministries Network. Not all churches are exclusionary of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.) The exhibit was put out by the great folks at Family Diversity Projects who currently have six traveling shows, including their newest project Pioneering Voices: Portraits of Transgender People. Family Diversity Projects works to use the images and stories of real families to create exhibitions that show and advocate for the true diversity of families, along lines of race, sexuality, gender identity, disability, mental illness, family composition, and so forth.

At the end of the day, it is truly heartening for me to see more and more voices speaking out in love of the community we can build in our differences.