This week we are celebrating all the queer parents out there. Not surrogate queer family, but queer folks with parental responsibilities in heteronormativity-defying nuclear families.
Which brings us to the cutest news I’ve seen in a long time: A same-sex flamingo couple at the Paignton Zoo in England hatched a chick and is raising it at their own. Pete Smallbones, the Curator of Birds at the zoo, thinks the new parents (Arthur and Chester) found an egg which had been forgotten by the flamingo that laid it, thereby “adopting” it as their own. Charles and Arthur both have typical male reproductive anatomy for their species, the Chilean flamingo.
Chilean flamingo pairs provide biparental care to their offspring, meaning that both parents collaborate in raising their chicks. In a heterosexual pairing, this means both the mother and the father keep the egg warm before hatching and provide food to the chick after hatching. In fact, a study of captive Chilean flamingoes in the Dublin Zoo found that mothers and fathers spend roughly equal time incubating an egg pre-hatching. Therefore, all members of the species (regardless of sex) are innately capable of providing parental care once an egg has been laid. In this way, Arthur and Chester’s successful hatching shouldn’t come as a surprise. They found an egg and are fully capable of caring for the chick.
Bird species have a high prevalence of same-sex pairings, especially when the male to female ratio is skewed (as can happen in captive zoo populations). But to be honest, I can’t think of a gayer species than the flamingo. The pink color, the elegance of their repose, the way they stand on one leg and ooze sex appeal. I mean the word “flaming” is right there in the name ;;;
Flamingoes were my favorite animal to visit at the zoo as a child, and I would beg my mom to make their enclosure our first stop whenever we visited. You would think that this obsession would have tipped us off to my (latent) queer identity, but denial is a hell of a drug.
Anyway, families come in all sizes, compositions, and origins. Parenthood and birthing are options for queer and trans people too as documented by a recent article by the PRIDE Study and in a first-person account by Gavin Fraser, a graduate research assistant at Boston University, reminds us today for STAT. Of course, we as queer people innately know what options are available to us. But if we are loud enough about our experiences (like Gavin), perhaps we can counteract the social messaging that tells us otherwise.1
I am not a nuclear parent, and I frankly don’t see that changing anytime soon. But, some of you may be nuclear parents that don’t fit the heteronormative mold. And like Arthur and Chester, you are fully equipped to manage parenthood with aplomb. So, here’s to Arthur and Chester’s growing family and to yours!