The Person Missing From Every Same-Sex Family Photo
How to respond when someone says, “But look how happy their family is”
You’re on your social media feed and you see a photo from your old college roommate or your cousin. He’s with his same-sex partner, and they have a new baby they just picked up from their surrogate at the hospital. She’s with her wife and just had a baby via sperm donor. Or it’s a few years down the road, and you see a photo of the family at Disneyland, all smiles. The lighting is golden. The caption says something like love makes a family or our little miracle.
And if you’re honest, it does look like a happy family. If you’re asked what you think, what do you say? Most people freeze. Either they go silent (which feels like betrayal of the children’s rights they actually care about), or they blurt something that sounds cruel (which isn’t what they mean at all). Neither response serves the conversation or the children in the frame.
Katy Faust sat down last year with Josh Szeps, an Australian podcaster and a gay man who is married and raising children conceived via egg donation and surrogacy, for what may be the most civil and substantive conversation on this topic you’ll find anywhere. Josh is sharp, well-read, genuinely curious, and he pushes back hard. It’s exactly the kind of conversation your friends and family members are having in their heads when they look at you sideways for caring about children’s rights.
Here’s what Katy said about that “sunny photo”, and how you can be equipped to say it too.
Josh described what he sees when a same-sex couple raises children: stability, love, investment, flourishing.
Katy responded:
“By definition, the child has lost a biological parent. A full or partial relationship. They do not have their own mother and father in their home every day, 100% of the time, which, from a child development standpoint, is sort of the social-emotional staples: mother’s love, father’s love, and stability.”
And then, critically, she names exactly what is missing from the frame:
“You’ve got two lesbian mothers, they’ve got their kids. What we’re not seeing in that picture is that a father, a biological father, has been erased from that picture.”
This isn’t a mean thing to say. It’s the most honest thing to say. The photo is real. The love is real. And something, someone, is also genuinely absent.
Why this matters for your conversations
When we see a “sunny photo” of a same-sex family, our instinct is to respond to what’s in the frame. The perspective that Them Before Us is equipping everyone with trains us to ask about what’s been cropped out.
This isn’t about whether the parents love their children. It’s about whether the child’s full story is being told, and whether society is allowed to ask that question out loud. At Them Before Us, the question is always: what has the child lost for this family to exist?
When someone says this → Here’s how to respond
“But those kids look so happy.” → “They might be happy in many ways. And I also think we should be honest about WHO isn’t in that picture, a mother or a father who was deliberately removed from their story before they could have a say. Happiness now doesn’t mean there’s no loss worth naming.”
Have you checked out our Them Before Us book and the chapters on Biology and Gender? You’ll have everything you need to talk about the awesome and important differences a father and mother offer their children.
“You just hate gay people.” → “Actually, a children’s rights framework critiques any adult - straight, gay, married, single, fertile or infertile - who puts their desire for a child above the child’s right to know and be known by both biological parents. Katy Faust says the same thing about heterosexual couples using sperm donors and IVF. It’s not about orientation. It’s about putting the rights of the children first.”
“Children just need two loving parents.” → “Loving adults raising a child is a good thing, but if we’re just going to play with the numbers, isn’t three adults better than two? Four adults even better? That’s ignoring the more essential question. Children don’t only need love. They need identity. They need to be able to answer the question ‘who am I?’, and when we intentionally sever that biological link, we make that question harder to answer, sometimes for a lifetime.” (Katy raises this starting at minute 18)
Check out this resource for more on this point:
“Those studies show kids with same-sex parents do just as well.” → “That’s worth looking at carefully. In the conversation, Josh actually cites about twelve studies, and Katy walks through the methodological problems with most of them, self-selecting samples, parent-reported outcomes, and not waiting for children to grow up and report for themselves. The Dutch population study is the strongest one, and even that Katy addresses directly.” (40:54 – 53:33)
For more about why those studies don’t show what they claim to show:
“You want to take children away from loving parents.” → “No. Them Before Us isn’t about breaking up existing families. It’s about the system, the laws, technologies, and cultural norms that make it easy to design a child without a mother or father in the first place. The question is upstream: should we be building systems that intentionally manufacture motherless or fatherless children?”
“Well, you can’t choose who you fall in love with.” → “At TBU, we’re not making a statement about adults and the romantic choices they make. We always bring it back to the children. Should the cost of forming the family we want be paid by a child who had no vote?”
Splitting apart “mom.”
Katy explains that until very recently, a child’s genetic mother, birth mother, and social mother were always the same woman. Now, through surrogacy and IVF, those three roles can be split among three different people.
The only relationship that all of us have for the first nine months of our life, the bond with the birth mother, can now be deliberately severed at birth, not through tragedy, but by design.
This is the piece that most people haven’t thought through. The conversation around same-sex parenting tends to skip it entirely, because surrogacy feels like a neutral medical procedure. Katy argues it’s anything but neutral for the child who loses that first bond. When someone in your life says the sunny photo proves everything is fine, this is the part of the story they haven’t seen yet.
The question to leave them with
Josh, to his enormous credit, keeps coming back to wellbeing and data. He’s genuinely trying to reason through this. But near the end of the conversation (around 1:47:57), Katy lands on what may be the clearest summary of the whole Them Before Us framework:
“I want to create a world where they don’t have to lose their mother to come into existence.”
When we’re asked the pressing questions around marriage and family structure, we always bring it back to the rights of the child. Look at the situation from the child’s perspective, and it will give you clarity to defend them no matter what the topic is.
Watch the full conversation
Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs.
We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility.
We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.
Learn more or support our mission: www.thembeforeus.com
Ugh this is such a sad topic. Thank you for writing and equipping.
I often give the example of the Closed Adoption Era (roughly 1946 thru 1973), when a large number of adoptees were coercively taken from their unmarried birth mothers and given up for adoption to married couples. Even those adoptees who were happy in their adoptive family have the desire to do a birth search for first family/blood relations, and many have done so. The "what's missing" part is enormous -- often a teleological focus throughout life -- and directly relates to personal identity and one's connection to people, history, and location.
As the CAE cohort of adoptees came of age, birth search stories became more and more common, in books, magazines, and online stories, and continues to this day. The stories and research are everywhere. Now that we have DNA services, people are using that as well. Even into old age, "what's missing" NEVER goes away. Granted, no life is ever perfect, but specifically creating a child through artificial means (for whatever reason), knowing they will have this lifelong pain of disconnection at their core, is absolutely untenable.