I thought the points on this thread would make a good letter to the editor: www.theguardian.com/info/2015/jan/28/contact-the-guardian-letters-desk
This such a superficial analogy coming from a professional philosopher. I looked it up online because I had expected more robust ideas without such obvious shortcomings. Nope, it is just an emotive analogy.
In Sophie-Grace Chappell’s analogy it is only by blurring categories that the claims can make sense: Sophie-Grace says:
‘Nobody sensible thinks that the existence of adoptive parents undermines our understanding of what it is to be a parent. On the contrary, it extends it.’
blog.apaonline.org/2018/07/20/trans-women-men-and-adoptive-parents-an-analogy/
Yes- absolutely in a social sense (has this ever been not the case? Adoption isn’t some new thing, it goes back thousands of years..) But no, if you still want to acknowledge the reality that there are different routes to parenthood. No if you think that the biological reality of how children come into being is important because it creates its own unique set of needs and issues for biological children and their biological or genetic parents. Just No, if you think adoption as the route to parenthood creates unique needs and issues for adopted children and their adoptive parents.
Isn’t this because adoption is not proposed as the experimental, unproved remedy to a deep personal emotional conflict of the individual, nor as the remedy to an individual’s wish to be read by others as the opposite parenting status and thereby changing their outward appearances, or a remedy to wanting to be read as a person of no parenting status, or someone outside of all parenting status, or someone of a new parenting status completely?
I would counter that there isn’t a broad umbrella of adopters with a spectrum of motivations whose motivations should validly entitle them all to be adopters. No, that would be anti-safeguarding at worst and at best could not take account of the individual needs and history of the adopted child: (www.stonewall.org.uk/what-does-trans-mean)
Whereas S-G C says (in the same blog linked to above) ‘... the general moral rule underlying everything I say here: [is] that people’s life-choices about how they want to be gendered are (like the life-choice to adopt) a deep and serious matter for them and so must be respected.’
I don’t think many people would agree that the wish to adopt ‘must be respected’ just because it was decided in a deep and serious way. Or that it should be be respected simply because it comes from adult choices whether it was chosen deeply or trivially, ill informed or well-informed, immaturely with no idea of the consequences, or well thought through and based on other’s experiences.
The diverging point from an issue of personal gender identity, is that adoption isn’t just about what the adult wants. It’s also about the specific child and her or his specific needs and background and doing the best for that child within the available options.
Adoption is for people who want a relationship with a child and who have been thoroughly investigated by third parties as to how they propose to do that, including with interviews with the people around them and visits their home. Adopters have to go to classes to prepare them. Things that can and do go wrong are kept front and centre of the discussion as well as the great bits. There isn’t an unrealistic brave and stunning gloss put on it. Potential adopters or actual adopters aren't shut down, castigated and their reputations besmirched if they ask questions about what could, or does go wrong. If the adopter is found unsuitable by third parties then the adoption doesn’t happen. All that is obviously hard, but an important part of prioritising the child in the process, which has to be more important than paying ‘respect’ to adult wishes by automatically granting them.
The fact of adoption does not in any way infringe on the fact of biological parenting.
Adopters are not critical of and never threaten biological parents because they speak about their experiences which could cause hurt feelings to some adopters nor do adopters accuse them of ‘excluding‘ them, simply for going through the facts of pregnancy and birth and wanting to talk about it with others who share the experience or example wanting to make fertility or maternity or post natal services better.
Adoptive parents acknowledge the differences and create their own spaces to talk together as adopters about their own experiences of being parents and becoming parents, where these do not already exist. They don’t try to enter and take up the services and places where birth parents are vulnerable together, like postnatal wards, antenatal or breastfeeding classes, or where attention is focused on a mother’s own physical needs, like birthing suites or c section operating theatres.
Adopters don’t lie to their child by saying that they gave birth to that child themselves or claim that they had legal responsibility for their child prior to the adoption, adopters do the important work of painstakingly acknowledging biological truth and the often difficult relationships and realities and significance of the adoption.
They do all this for the benefit of the child’s understanding and healthy emotional development. (As well as talking about the loving relationships that the child has in their lives).
Adopters often acknowledge this difficulty in campaignIng for better professional psychological support for their children, to help them in processing traumatic loss, even while they and their children know they have been loving and caring for them, perhaps for years by this point.
Adoption is the most child-centred thing I can think of. There may be great adult rewards. Hope I am not overstepping saying all this, I am not an adoptive parent nor an adoptee, I just know some.
There’s a response by Holly Lawford-Smith to Chappell’s analogy here: medium.com/@aytchellis/the-adoption-analogy-revisited-ec0e0b28581
Haven’t had time to read it yet but will be interested to do that later.