A Great Step Forward in a Long Journey

This is a little late because I got caught up in school, but The big news in the GLBT community last week was Pres. Obama signing the Matthew Shepard Act into law. This law brings the GLBT community into the classes protected from hate crimes. It was a long, painful road to get here, but it makes me even more optimistic that every day will bring more headway on the GLBT rights front. I get discouraged sometimes because it seems like everything we want to do is a fight. My beloved and I want to adopt a child within a couple of years of my graduation, we want to get married, and we want to protect what little we have scraped together while working towards our future. But to do all this we have to take 50 million more things into account than your normal couple.

For example, adoption. The state we live in makes it illegal for us to adopt a baby, since technically, we are still a gay couple. So we are looking at out of the country adoption but the international adoption book says that no country will KNOWINGLY place a baby with a gay couple. So I apply as a single person? Doesn't that disregard what will be a 12-13 year long, great relationship? Where does that leave Hayden as a parent? And what about us being a trans couple and Hayden legally being male by then? Or do I try to get pregnant even that it will cost a mint, and due to health problems, I might not be able carry it to term? But it will give us more protection as a family.

All of these things to think about just to start a family with my partner. In some ways its good because we can plan, but bad because we HAVE to plan. The hope I have for it all is that it will be easier for us because I am (well will be) a lawyer, that the rules will change, and that everything, as ususal, will work out exactly the way it is supposed to.