Queering Family: How Being Donor-Conceived Deepened My Queer Identity

** Content note for coming out rejection and Christian homophobia.

It took sitting across from my parents in my university campus police station at 5 am for me to finally get that genes don't make a family. Like, really get it.

In the end, it had only taken 3 facts to break us. Just a few nights before, I’d impulsively Kool-Aid-Man’d my way out of the closet during a routine family phone call, blurting out to my Chinese Evangelical parents that I was bisexual, no longer Christian, and (most nightmarish of all) a Psychology major.

My parents responded the way I always knew they would. Blockaded by intergenerational trauma, cultural homophobia, and Christian fundamentalism, our family pinballed for days between anger, confusion, and fear. Finally, I decided the only place we could talk was the neutral, bad-coffee-scented Switzerland of my college’s Public Safety department.

We met up just before daybreak. Tense conversation gave way to verbal sparring. Hours later, my parents and I surrendered, accepting that no one was going to budge. After the sun rose and my parents drove away, it was my dad’s face that lingered in my mind. He had given me half of what made me – my love of junk food, my quiet nature, my nose, and my genetic predisposition to a perma-dad bod.

Yet none of that protected me from the memory of how his tongue had volleyed Sodom, Gomorrah, sin, shame, his lip curling as the words curdled midair. I had listened as if miles away, watching from a future where I had already forgotten what it was like to be his daughter.

If this was family, I didn’t want it anymore – but luckily, I was surrounded by people who would teach me another way to know it. I found family in homemade meals, movie nights, air mattresses, spare couches, and job tips, as friends came together with financial aid counselors, bosses, therapists, and more to hold me up. The family you choose, I decided, will always mean so much more than the family you’re assigned.

And that is the story of how I became a number-one believer that biology means nothing – until a 23andMe test changed everything, again.

For most of my life, I’d known three things about my biological mother: she was probably Italian American. She already had kids. And she wanted nothing to do with us.

My parents broke the news to my twin and I over the kitchen table sometime before middle school. They’d used an anonymous Caucasian egg donor, they said, but my mom had given birth to us, and we had our dad’s genes. The donor did it to help, but she had her own family, and we weren’t in it. As they spoke, an empty silhouette of this disinterested stranger coalesced in my mind, her back turned and face hidden. And that’s how she stayed.

Over the years, fevers of curiosity overtook me. I’d Google whether it was possible to find an egg donor or lay awake at night wondering if I’d ever walked past a half-sibling. Strangely, if I dared to bring her up, my parents colored new traits onto the empty silhouette, like obesity and alcoholism.

I quickly learned that we didn’t talk about her – or the fact that I was visibly mixed race in a Chinese American family. I didn’t mind our silence. I hated my appearance. It was her fault that the world would never see me as fully part of my family or my community, and because she’d left no information, I’d never even be able to answer “what are you?” So I banished the silhouette, and all thoughts of my mixed appearance along with her.

Then the pandemic hit, bringing a fresh wave of anti-Asian hate along with it. I agonized over how strangers saw me in the produce aisle, yet I quickly realized that I wasn’t catching the same flak as my monoracial Asian friends and family.  Slowly, it dawned on me: I needed to work out for myself what it meant to be both raised as Asian and seen as mixed.

Like any good millennial, I turned to the interwebs for answers. Eventually, a transracial adoptee pointed me to a donor-conceived Facebook community, where friendly strangers encouraged me to get tested. I stood in the shower and thought it through. After so much dysphoria, I just wanted to know my ethnicities. Siblings could be cool – maybe. I’d never go looking for the donor, though. Some random white lady? What would ever come of that?

So I spit (and spit and spit again), I mailed, I waited. I got the email on a solo morning shift at work. Excited, I opened 23andMe. Here, answers: Italy. France. China. A DNA Relatives section glowed, beckoning. I clicked on a whim, sifting through. Then I saw it. A woman’s name. Her birth year. And the final column to the right: our DNA Relationship.

Throughout the course of life, most people come to know how it feels to read one word that puts the whole world on pause. In a college acceptance letter, maybe. A bank account balance. A news report. This was my word:

“Mother.”

I clapped my hand to my mouth and burst into tears.

And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.

In the days that followed, I ping-ponged between shocked ecstasy and jaded indifference. I had thought it was still a one-in-a-million miracle shot for donors and children to match.

Now, my support network kept asking what I wanted or expected. Those answers existed behind a deep fog in my head, if they existed at all.

I’d avoided the mirror for years, seeing my face as a reminder of the racial dysphoria I’d never be able to resolve. Now, I compared photos of her with my reflection. I found myself wondering about family recipes, about language, about culture – things that might give new depth to my mixed identity. Overnight, my piercing grief over being condemned to a lifetime of mismatched belonging melted away, replaced only with a fresh slate of questions and possibilities.

A little after New Year’s Day, I sent her a message on Facebook. I braced myself to be blocked, cursed out, or never even read. Instead, she responded right away. We chatted painstakingly, each afraid of scaring off the other. Weeks passed, then months. I sent her graduation photos, she told me about her children. We swapped well wishes and photos of dinner. I had never expected to enjoy this, even as I still expected nothing of her.

As the tension melted between us, new truths began to emerge. She told me that she had donated to help another family for little compensation, but she’d never even been told whether any children came of it. She’d been hoping and praying to God that one day she would know who we were. She was elated. I was gut-punched. In my mind, that old silhouette burned away under the scorching light of the real her: my biological mother.

I struggled to make sense of my new reality. I’d insisted that biology was meaningless for years, and I’d wanted nothing to do with this person all my life. Yet how I should feel was meaningless in the face of what I did feel.

I quickly realized that being donor-conceived required me to ask big questions, then live my way into my own answers. What is race? What is cultural heritage? What is kinship?

I’d never realized how much DNA could be wrapped up in all those questions, but there I was, fumbling my way through an existential Cat’s Cradle.

Then, in October 2021, Real Life Mag published an article called “The Parent Trap.” Its co-authors criticized how online queer circles had recently begun to accept NPE (not parent expected) umbrella groups, including adoptees, donor-conceived people, and those who experience DNA surprises. They claimed that these groups buy into the oppressive ideal of bionormativity, or “the claim that biology prescribes identities, hierarchizes relationships, and hold pre-ordained truths.”

The authors rightly pointed out that queer and feminist advocates have worked for decades to normalize non-heterosexual, non-biological families. When adoptee, donor-conceived, and other NPE advocates talk about DNA as if it magically dictates a person’s truest self, the authors said, they are buying into dangerous conservatism and challenging queer rights.

As a queer survivor of abuse, I had more than enough reason to agree that DNA isn’t everything, and that homophobes have invalidated queer relationships for a long time by putting genetic parents on a pedestal. But I also didn’t see why we had to create a false dichotomy between biological family and radical, chosen family. As the facilitator of Donor Conceived Community’s LGBTQIA+ DCP peer support group, I saw firsthand how this binary thinking pits queer DCP between communities.

In our peer support group, one of our ground rules is that family, genetics, and belonging are what you make of it. There’s space for all family types, all kinds of terms for donors and siblings, and all kinds of decisions about DNA testing and donor conception use. Everyone makes different meanings of DNA. Why? Because DNA is wrapped up in religion, citizenship, culture, race, appearance, and yes, for some people, family.

As a queer, polyamorous person with a long-term partner and no interest in marriage, I’ve always been curious about what queering relationships would look like in my own life. Queering is the act of questioning, playing with, and transcending societal norms, from how you dress to how you love. The authors of “The Parent Trap” believe that when NPE advocates see DNA as meaningful, they’re buying into oppressive norms. Yet to me, giving myself permission to explore contact with my donor conception relatives, including my biological mother, IS just another way to queer my relationships.

When I say that I have three biological parents – two who gave me my genes, and one who gave birth to me – I queer others’ expectations of parenthood. When I pick and choose who I build relationships with on all three sides, I queer others’ assumptions about the importance of given family. When I refuse to value my relationship with my partner more than my relationships with my friends, my biological mother, my twin, or my cousins, I queer others’ belief that romance should come first.

This Pride Month, I’m grateful for the long, winding journey I’ve taken to make meaning of kinship and family, from a campus police station to the homepage of 23andMe. I stand in solidarity with all LGBTQIA+ DCP, no matter how they choose to relate to their given relatives. Family, genetics, and belonging are what we make of it – and we all deserve access to information that can help us figure that out. ♦

Max Tang is the Community Coordinator at DCC.

Max facilitates DCC’s peer support groups for BIPOC & Multiracial and LGBTQIA+ donor-conceived people. She is currently pursuing her Master’s in Clinical Social Work at Simmons University. As the queer, biracial, donor-conceived daughter of Cantonese American immigrants, Max hopes to serve her own marginalized communities as a trauma-informed therapist and public advocate.

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