Do Same Sex Parents Affect Your Gender Identity?

Since same sex marriage has been approved in the house of commons, attention has turned to the wellness of any potential children that same sex couples have. Based on various studies measuring ‘academic performance, cognitive development, social development, psychological health, early sexual activity, and substance abuse’, the American Sociological Association states, ‘Whether a child is raised by same-sex or opposite-sex parents has no bearing on a child’s wellbeing’.

So how much of a central role do biological fathers and mothers play in your development towards healthy adulthood? You spend the first 20 odd years of your life in a primary relationship with adult caregivers, and so obviously this shapes your development in essential ways. According to Harville Hendrix, author of Getting The Love You Want, your relationship experience with each of your parents plays a major role in not only the selection of your mate, and is most often at the root of significant areas of conflict.

Renowned author and developmental theorist Erik Erikson adds that there are two stages of human development; establishing your identity, and attaining intimacy, primarily with a romantic and sexual partner. When combined with Hendrix’s theory, you can see that the two essential tasks of forming a healthy identity and establishing healthy intimacy are going to be negotiated primarily through your many formative years of relational experience with your parents, but what if your parents are a same sex couple?

Whether gender is a social construct or an inherited factor of your identity, same sex parenting raises some questions, albeit not necessarily vital ones. Could a girl with two dads or a boy with two mums struggle to establish their gender identity as she or he lacks a relational experience with a same sex parent? What if a boy had two dads or a girl had two mums? According to the experts noted above, if you have heterosexual parents you seek out a special kind of intimacy through your relationship experience with the opposite sex parent, as they provide something that you don’t have, and you are drawn to.

Yet these questions, and others raised by those who are unsure about same sex parenting, serve to open our eyes to more questions about our preconceived notions of what identity is, and whether or not the status quo is worth holding on to. Is it necessarily a bad thing to move away from a bi-construct of gender, in which things and people are deemed ‘manly’ or ‘feminine’, with no room for middle ground? Or could same sex parents, who perhaps have struggled with, and come to terms with, a more nuisanced view of gender, allow children to define themselves on a wider spectrum of terms?