Illustration by Matthew Daley

My mother’s house looks like my long-repressed childhood memories. The black floral wallpaper is veiled with dust, cloaking walls yellowed by years of chain- smoked cigarettes. Everything decorative is dangerous: swords hang in place of picture frames, flanked by ominous leather ropes of unknown origin.

My mother’s house feels like a castle, but one where everyone lives in the dungeon. It’s a house made of walls that could be so beautiful, if they weren’t so broken.

When I walk back into my mother’s house nearly two decades after our estrangement—a separation born the day her drinking became too much for me to bear—everything is just as I left it, just as I imagined it after all those years.

Well, almost everything.

In my vivid visions of those dark walls, I never imagined my adult self standing within them, hugging a person who is both a stranger and my mom at the same time. And I definitely couldn’t have envisioned how I would get there in the first place—that it would take psychedelics for my mind to open enough to let me open my mother’s front door.

*

Unlike my mother’s house, my psychedelic guide’s home is a sanctuary. Her porch is enclosed by warm stone and decorated with trinkets and treasures: crystals and incense line the windowsills, spider plants spill from hanging baskets like fountains of forest. Each time we meet, we sit on the floor, a pot of magic-mushroom-steeped tea steaming between us.

My guide is an underground plant medicine ceremonialist and bodyworker who uses psilocybin—the hallucinogenic component of magic mushrooms—to help people tap into their own inner knowing. She works outside of any medical system and doesn’t call herself a therapist. Instead, she holds space for people, using mushrooms to light the way.

I visit this guide because talk therapy always fell flat for me. I could recite the painful story of my childhood mechanically to anyone who asked, but I could never texturize these tales with feeling, because I didn’t seem to have any. My emotions were invisible rocks that I carried, weighing me down so viscerally that it would take a proper excavation to set myself free. Magic mushrooms, I hoped, would help me unearth the hurt.

*

Though psychedelic therapy is slowly becoming mainstream, with the federal government acknowledging promising clinical trial results and a first-of-its-kind in Canada psychedelic- assisted therapy program introduced at Vancouver Island University’s Nanaimo campus last year, it still remains illegal and largely underground thanks to its fractured history in the Western world.

Psychedelic use dates back centuries, with early psilocybin use (called teonanacatl) linked to the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec in what is now called Mexico. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began to study it in North America, with researchers examining whether psychedelics could treat alcoholism and various mental illnesses.

Their investigations showed some of what shamans knew all along—that psychedelics could be used to treat addictions to other drugs, recover buried emotions and process childhood trauma, or even ease the mental distress faced by cancer patients. These results were promising enough to warrant further analysis, but as psychedelics became associated with anti-war counterculture in the 1960s, psychoactive substances became outlawed. For psychedelic research, the Summer of Love became the summer of loss.

As history book authors wrote their chapters on the War on Drugs, psychedelics remained tied to a harmful, hippie stigma. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interest in psychedelic research was gradually renewed, with studies assessing the effectiveness of MDMA, LSD (acid) and psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions. With tempered excitement, researchers began conducting the first human trials since the ’70s, instilling a new sense of hope in the field of psychotherapy.

Today, it seems we’re finally reaching the level of societal acceptance needed for a psychedelic therapy renaissance, with Health Canada offering some exemptions for researchers and health care practitioners to study or administer psilocybin and a number of convenient (yet illegal) mushroom dispensaries openly operating storefronts in major Canadian cities, akin to cannabis shops pre-legalization. These shifts are opening a potent path to healing for people like me.

*

At each visit, my guide asks me to begin my journey with an intention. Spilling a brave breath, I tell her I’m here to work through my childhood trauma. I want to dive deep into the cellars of my psyche that I’ve locked away from myself, to go back to the time of court orders and custody battles, child psychologists and threats of foster care—all those things that slashed the already precarious tightrope connection I had with my mother. Through my words, I pour my intention into my mug of mushroom tea.

It’s not long after drinking the psilocybin that my body feels lighter, colours become fractal and I enter that classic psychedelic state of oneness. I feel as though I am floating in bliss, embraced by levity. That is, until I’m not.

Abruptly, the room darkens and my lungs feel compressed beneath bricks. I see my heart trapped in a steel lockbox inside a pressure cooker. It vibrates like water coming to a boil, getting tighter and constricting, as toxic grey smoke billows from my body. Tears flood my face in a relentless stream. Overwhelmed by panic, I can barely grasp an inhale.

Everything that happens next happens so quickly, a lifetime of painful memories flip-booked in a nanosecond. I’m alone with the lightning inside of me and it’s terrifying. Out loud, I scream.

That’s when the lockbox shatters, revealing a white light emanating from my chest. I see my adult hand entwine its fingers with those of my child self. I hear myself telling her it’s okay, that we’re safe and we can let go of the pain now. As I do, my heart seems to release its venom. It leaves behind a void, but I see it as newfound space for the loving joy I’ve yearned for.

*

Thanks to neuroscientific research, the trippy magic of the psychedelic experience can actually be explained. It’s thought that at its root lies the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during states of rest and thought. With psychedelic use, the DMN slows down, creating space for new neural pathways that override the typical mental shortcuts the brain uses to process information quickly in day-to-day life. This can open the door to creativity, new ideas, meditative states and ego dissolution. It can also help us tap into deeper states of consciousness beyond our regular, waking awareness, which is likely why psychedelic users can often access buried emotions.

When these emotions are surfaced in a safe way, led by trained therapists and integrated using other therapeutic and trauma-informed modalities like somatic experiencing and talk therapy, or daily practices like yoga or journaling, people may have a chance to accept, forgive and heal from their past experiences. For many, like myself, this can be life-changing.

My guided journeys get worse before they get better, as I dig into the lingering pain of my abandonment wound. With the support of a counsellor trained in somatic experiencing, I feel like I’m knocking my own house down, deconstructing those survival-mode walls that I built for myself in childhood. I work hard to construct something new, and each day I come home from a journey, I begin to greet a little bit more of the person I want to be.

Slowly and non-linearly, I process my anger and shame, exchanging it for acceptance and compassion. I swing through depressive states and, against my extroverted nature, I isolate myself as I struggle to navigate the world wearing the mask of the old me—a mask that doesn’t seem to fit anymore. But feeling that ungrounded comes with opportunities to foster new outlooks: I’m finally able to replace a desperate longing for the maternal relationship I wish I had with an unconditional acceptance of the human that my mother is, flaws and all.

Out of the blue, I call her.

*

On the phone, my mother’s voice sounds unfamiliar. We talk about nothing, the weather, the news. The rift of almost 20 years is too wide to catch up more meaningfully. Struggling to change the subject with grace, I blurt out that I forgive her.

My mother seems caught off guard. She says thank you and not much else. But it’s the first test of my ability to love her without expectations. I forgive her as part of my own healing, and so I forgive her with no strings attached. The simplicity of the exchange is no match for the radiance of feeling unburdened—the feeling of turning my body into a comfortable home at last.

My sharp edges soften enough to bring me to her doorstep a year later, our first hug bringing me to immediate tears. We look at old baby photos and offer each other small but symbolic tokens: the rose quartz that I carried to every journey for her, and a pair of earrings from my late grandmother for me. We promise to keep in closer touch, which we won’t do, but I’m at peace with the way we are. Because standing there, at my mother’s doorstep, I could finally see that although the walls of my mother’s house may be broken, they’re still beautiful.

I’ve always seen myself as a mother. As a child, I had dolls that I fed and bathed. I was one of the oldest of a dozen cousins, and often, there was a baby for me to hold and play with. I read parenting guides and magazines cover to cover—not required reading for a kid, but I gobbled them up. I loved caring for babies—figuring out what made them smile, rocking them to sleep. I couldn’t wait to share my favourite movies with them, to embarrass them while singing loudly in the car, to take them to their first day of school. I wanted it all.

What I didn’t plan for, though, was growing up queer. That realization hit about 10 years ago when I moved to Pickering, Ont., from Jamaica. I was just 13 and I had a lot on my plate: teenage angst, puberty, and navigating immigrant life and the struggles that came with it. I was too busy figuring my new reality to give much thought to my sexuality and what it meant for my future.

But after coming out at 16 years old, I found myself questioning gender roles and heteronormativity, things I was told were absolutes. I knew my kids were meant to get their father’s last name. He would teach them sports I liked as kid, like soccer and cricket. He would tiptoe through the house with a baseball bat when we heard a creak in the night. All of these beliefs melted away once I realized I was queer, and were replaced with questions: How would I parent my future children? What did it mean to parent with another woman?

I couldn’t look to the media for advice on LGBTQ parentage. Queer families on TV were too white, too rich, or too tragic to be relatable. I watched Willow and Tara fall in love on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only for Tara to be shot and killed. The cartoons I watched, like Adventure Time, could only hint at queer themes or risk angering parents. Comics and young adult fiction were better outlets, as writers had better control over what happened to their queer characters, but great stories I could relate to were few and far between.

According to Statistics Canada, 99.9 percent of Canadian children live with opposite-sex parents, indicative of heteronormative family structures. I needed to seek out the 0.1 percent outside of that structure who could tell me about their experiences firsthand. For young Canadians looking to navigate the world of queer parentage, resources are surprisingly scarce—especially in a country so highly regarded for its LGBTQ rights. As with many queer matters, my best bet at getting answers was turning to the community.

***

Daniel Gosson wanted answers, too. The 35-year-old loves children, and it reflects in his years of work as a registered early childhood educator. He and his partner, Patrick, both see themselves as fathers, but they had few queer role models. While gay parenthood has become more visible in recent years, the pair felt they still had limited influences, like Neil Patrick Harris and his family. The only other gay fathers Gosson knew were parents of his students or co-workers, and he felt awkward asking them such personal questions.

Gosson got most of his information from researching, something he did often for his master’s in early childhood education. Even then, he couldn’t wholly relate. “Most of it is directed at lesbian mothers, since that is the largest group of queer-headed families and they’re starting to grow from that,” he says. The statistics back it up: In 2011, there were 7,700 children under 25 living with female same-sex parents in Canada, as opposed to 1,900 living with male same-sex parents.

Gosson, like me, always knew he wanted to be a parent. “My mom has told me whether I have them biologically, adopt, or steal, she demands I have grandchildren,” he says—a common retort heard by many queer couples. “She wants me to have a family.” My own parents have said similar things. Each birthday, they jokingly ask for grandchildren. I’d oblige them if I had any idea where to begin.

I was sure Kim Katrin Milan could help. She and her husband, Tiq, spoke regularly at universities and conferences about all things queer, and she is a co-owner of Toronto’s Glad Day Bookshop, the world’s oldest LGBTQ bookstore. The pair welcomed a baby girl, Soleil, in January. I met with her at her house in February, only a few weeks after Soleil was born. I watched Tiq pass the baby over to Milan, who wrapped her in a shoulder sling. The baby slept soundly on her mother’s chest throughout the interview.

Here they were, a queer family with a beautiful baby of their own. They both looked so graceful and effortless. But Milan let me know the process was anything but. Her first pregnancy before Soleil ended in a devastating miscarriage. Because Milan is a public figure, word spread quickly. “Having to go through it publicly bonded me to other folks whose first or first few pregnancies were miscarriages,” Milan recalls. “I got to start having conversations with people about making families. All these people reached out and kept saying, ‘We’ve never seen this and we have no examples of this and it means a lot to us that you’re willing to…give us an idea of how we can do this.’”

Community support is a major factor in queer parentage: Where traditional resources are unavailable, queer friends are there to lean on. During her pregnancy with Soleil, for instance, Milan opted to use a doula to further embrace that sense of community. A full spectrum doula, Giselle Johnston offers services to expecting parents from conception until postpartum. Doulas tend to with the non-medical side of pregnancy, there to “care for you emotionally, physically, and provide information around whatever part of your journey you may be in in your reproductive life,” Johnston says.

As a Black, queer, non-binary person, Johnston understands that navigating pregnancy within a highly complex medical system is hard enough as it is. That’s why Johnston chooses to prioritize the needs of queer parents of colour, in the hopes that future parents don’t feel further marginalized by the medical world. “If I hear that they’re being misgendered, I will definitely speak up. If I feel that care providers are not respecting my clients who are non-gestational parents, I will speak up,” Johnston says. “If I feel that if something is being done against them, I try to speak out about it in that moment and hopefully provide learning opportunities or just try to make that situation a little bit lighter for my clients.”

There is also a better sense of understanding in the many routes to becoming a parent among community. Johnston reminds me of them: In-vitro fertilization is an option, albeit an expensive one. I could ask a friend to donate sperm, or visit a sperm bank. Or I could adopt. But there is no set way of going about parenthood as a queer woman. “Everyone is different,” Johnston says. “Every starting journey is different.”

***

I was raised by, and still live with, my married, heterosexual parents and younger brothers. In Jamaica, I also had various aunties and uncles, some related and some not, who fed and disciplined me as if I were their own. In many ways, this model resembles how LGBTQ communities turn to one another in their own parentage.

The nuclear model, once considered the norm, is no longer necessarily the status quo. While married couples are still most prevalent (Statistics Canada says they sit at about 67 percent of the population), there are more single parents in Canada than ever. Multigenerational families and common-law unions are also on the rise. And though the numbers are low, so are same-sex families.

I had a hard time finding concrete numbers about types of queer families that exist. As Gosson noted, there isn’t much research about queer families. “We’re starting to talk about queer-headed families, but we’re still very stuck on nuclear family structures,” he says. “If we’re not going to share queer family life or what it looks like for us, how are we going to know what it is? How is anyone going to know?”

In particular, there is little statistical insight into polyamorous queer families—those who parent with two or more partners. One of my former coworkers falls under this category. Samantha, whose name I’ve changed to protect her identity, lives with her 36-year-old husband Derick, and her partner, 28-year-old Kendra. Samantha and Derick were already married with children when they met Kendra three years ago at a friend’s party. Samantha and Kendra fell for each other, and all three now live under the same roof. Together, they parent three- and eight-year-old girls.

Kendra initially had hesitations about becoming a mom, but grew into the role. I saw them wrangling their rambunctious three-year-old and getting her ready for bed. Each parent does their fair share of raising the girls, evenly splitting the workload. Samantha is glad for the extra eyes in the house, noting that none of the kids can get away with much. “Someone always catches them,” she says.

As far as they all know, the girls are okay with the arrangement. They haven’t yet had a conversation about their polyamory, since their youngest is still a toddler. Their eight-year-old, however, is fully aware of the gender spectrum, and understands that Kendra’s pronouns are they and them. “It’s not something that is new or alien to her. It wasn’t a shell shock having someone non-binary, and she is the first person to correct someone if they use the wrong pronouns. She is absolutely militant saying, ‘No, Kendra’s they.’”

The unique perspectives their daughters have at such a young age gave me an appreciation for raising my own future children in a queer environment—where learning about differences and coming to celebrate them was commonplace. I wondered, though, what their futures might look like. As the child of cisgender, straight parents, it was difficult to imagine a life raised in a more LGBTQ-friendly family.

Then I found Molly Bud Willats. Between the ages of eight and 25, Willats lived in Digger House—Toronto’s first hostel for at-risk youth affectionately known as the “Lesbian Mansion”—with her mom, her mom’s partner, and her brother. The 29-year-old says her childhood was an alternative one, where she was raised in an “incredibly queer environment.” Her parents, both women, worked in the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, where she was surrounded by strong women, many of whom were gay, and she often attended Pride and political marches. Being raised in a communal household by both her moms—and, when they separated and dated again, their partners—and other younger women made her feel as if she always had someone to lean on. Willats painted a picture of a loving, politically active, community-based childhood—and it sounded incredible.

***

Everyone I spoke to for this story noted the importance of community, queerness, options, and children. In a TED Talk, Kim Katrin Milan said, “The gift of queerness is options.” In a few years, I will choose how to bring my child into the world. We will have chosen family, those whom I have decided to surround us with. I will choose to homeschool them like the Milans will with Soleil, or I will choose to bring them to rallies like Willats’s parents did.

“You don’t know you can be something until you see someone else doing it,” Samantha told me. She’s right. I was unsure about how to raise a child in an open environment until I saw Milan doing just that. My parents kept me away from politics and activism my whole childhood, but Willats’s parents didn’t—and she was better for it. Samantha and her family showed me polyamorous families can be healthy, possible, and even practical.

Our stories are complex and begging to be told. One day, I will add my own story to the colourful tapestry that is queer Canadian families.

Illustration by Matt Daley.

Amanda Thompson remembers meeting the other participant in her months-long game of tap-tap. She would tap on her partner’s belly, and someone would tap back from inside. After an eventful day, the result of careful deliberations and a planned C-section, Thompson met her daughter, feeling instantly familiar. As soon as she was born, “it was this lovely recognition of, ‘Oh, you’re this person we already know,’” she says.

Her birth followed purposeful conversations about identity. Thompson’s family is registered to the Flying Post First Nation. No one lives there, what was once a traditional hunting and trapping community. It’s a swamp in the north, she says. Members of her Ojibwe band live dotted around northern districts in Ontario, between Timmins, Nipigon, and Chapleau, her extended family in southwestern Ontario. Thompson grew up urban. “We don’t have the same sense of community in the same way that people who are registered to other First Nations would have a strong sense of place do,” she says. When she moved to Toronto at 21, those ties were built. “I made my community here,” Thompson says. “That means the community that I came from was already a mishmash of people from different nations and different cultures and different understandings of their culture, and they’ve all sort of migrated here in different ways.”

She’s one of three generations of women in her family denied status—starting with her grandmother, who lost recognition to her band under the Indian Act when she married a British man. Over the decades, Thompson and her mother regained their status under bills C-31 and C-3, contested attempts at restraining the paternalism of the Indian Act. When Thompson and her partner decided to start a family, questions of identity quickly entered their considerations.

But they were one of many. Before they had their daughter, meditation on Indigeneity, place, and identity needed to be weighed against morasses of potential legal twists. When couples visit fertility clinics in Toronto—30 percent of which are estimated to be from queer communities—about 20 of the 200 anonymous donors available to them are Canadian. None of those 20 is Indigenous.

Thompson knew she and her partner wanted to choose an Indigenous donor, and that he would be anonymous. The laws governing guardianship made it so they couldn’t be certain a known donor wouldn’t have the ability to retain custody down the line. And when they consulted legal experts, no one could tell them that he couldn’t definitively, not enough that they felt comfortable with the risks. Never mind how or if their child could gain status in such an arrangement.

The circuitous culture of service provision and legislation can descend on prospective families—especially those with members from queer Indigenous communities—in many ways, each on their own bringing a range of potential obstacles. The law in Ontario has only recently changed to better accommodate family planning routes for queer couples who may not always conceive children or come to be families the same way that many with two biological parents do. These choices amount to a process that can help honour and define familial identity for many couples. In ways large and small these systems aren’t set up to give many couples equal access to the choices and clinical experiences white, heterosexual, and cisgender couples can have.

***

Twice a week for about two years in the early 1990s, Harlan Pruden donated sperm to a fertility clinic, so conveniently situated on the University of Alberta campus where he was studying philosophy and political science that his visits could be scheduled in between classes. He earned $50 each time: half every week, and the balance at the end of a six-month cycle when, if he received a clean bill of sexual health, “the lot” would be closed out. The multi-page questionnaire he filled out the first day at the clinic asked about family history, disease, his IQ.

He doesn’t remember much about the donor agreement he signed at the time, in his early 20s. “It’s kind of like the Apple agreement,” he says. But he does recall clinic staff telling him that he was the only Native (they called him at the time) donor on their books. That was incentive enough for him. Pruden, registered to the Whitefish Lake First Nation in Alberta, calculated that while the cash was a nice perk, it was important for his semen to find its way to prospective families who wanted children, in the heart of Cree territory, as they were. Pruden figures he’s an anomaly: a gay-identified Two-Spirit sperm donor. He may be right. If not then, he would be now.

The history of assisted human reproduction (AHR) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) is that of heteronormative familial and clinical constructions that haven’t prepared the system to consistently and readily welcome families with specifications past blood type and eye colour. The earliest couples to start their families this way did so under a veil of secrecy— conception through a third party clashed with religious mores that neither patients nor doctors would defy. Frequently, sperm donors were medical students, plucked on the basis of little more than loose physical resemblance and proximity. At the time, fertility services largely dealt with offering solutions for male infertility in traditional monied families.

By the 1990s there were more than 100 fertility clinics in Canada operating in the sperm business. The rules governing donorship and tissue sales didn’t constrict until 2000, after a woman was inseminated with sperm carrying a strain of chlamydia. The updated Semen Regulations, active today, outline the criteria with which donors must comply and how clinics operate. These regulations are followed by the few remaining sperm banks in Canada—the largest of which is in Etobicoke, Ont.—to accept local donations.

With IVF costing anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, the added cost of travel to an urban hub can make an already prohibitive means of starting a family insurmountable

In some ways a bid to create bulwarks against commercializing the trade of genetic material, Parliament passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA) in 2004. This bill featured several provisions to regulate the proliferation of reproductive technologies. One of the provisions that survived the 2010 Supreme Court challenge was the regulation that prohibits compensation for material donation. Subsequently, the number of donors located in Canada plummeted. With little incentive for Canadian men to donate altruistically, the vast majority of sperm donors available to prospective families in Canadian sperm banks are from the U.S., with some from Europe.

Some stakeholders are not convinced by the ban on compensation. It’s one of the areas of the AHRA being taken up by the AHRA/LGBT Working Group, a team of academic, legal, and medical experts consulting with the Ministry of Health to bring a queer lens to policy issues. “The fertility world is so heterocentric,” says Andy Inkster, the health promoter at the LGBTQ Parenting Network leading the charge on the project. “And it’s not just the industry, it’s not just the practitioners. It’s deeply embedded into the structure of what they’re doing. Fertility is where eggs and sperm come together, and it’s embedded with heterosexist and heterocentric assumptions, but the reality is that a huge number of the people using assisted human reproduction are LGBTQ people.”

Where health care is concerned, let alone reproductive technology, the intended focus and professional training tend to be centred on the needs of straight patients. Through policy and practice, health outcomes for queer communities are disproportionately worse than the general population. Fertility services are also riddled with active and coded messaging—the model, centred on heteronormative paradigms as it is, assumes infertility when a couple first arrives. Queer patients don’t inherently need a battery of tests to determine their ability to have children, like a straight couple having tried and failed to conceive for a time, but often the clinic is their first step. Understanding the overall landscape of queer health, the Working Group petitioned the Ministry to amend the law to both correct some of its previously stated incongruities and make room for the queer families that represent a high percentage of fertility clinic patients.

***

For parents like Thompson, there is still little information on laws affecting Indigenous and queer families seeking AHR. Some researchers have attempted to unpack these filigreed legal implications and their unique effects on queer families in Canada. Lori Ross, associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto, spearheaded the Creating our Families study, which surveyed 66 LGBTQ couples in Ontario and their experiences accessing AHR services. According to Ross’s research, non-biological parents could face a variety of pressures, including cost barriers, discrimination, and the stress of pending but uncertain guardianship.

One of the simplest ways to circumvent a lack of donor sperm from one’s community is known donorship, an arrangement between a prospective parent and a friend, family member, or acquaintance. In the expert witness affidavit she wrote for the AHRA, Ross notes the catch-22 inherent to the decision-making for some prospective parents. An Indigenous participant in the study, for example, demonstrates the complexity of navigating known versus unknown donorship for families who want to maintain Indigenous lineage, but don’t want to bring a third parent into the arrangement: “If we had found a sperm donor whom we knew, who was status [according to the Indian Act], we’re then opening ourselves right back up to… the legal implications that would be involved. Because we’d have to list that person as their father, essentially.” Few people are equipped to neutralize the concern. While there are experts in fertility law and how it may pertain to queer families, the question of Indigenous parentage is not understood as ubiquitously. They’re “two different specialties that haven’t come together, really,” says Ross.

A spate of Canadian laws that purportedly exist to protect children have had ways of creeping into the family planning options for queer couples in Canada. In November 2016, Ontario’s All Families Are Equal Act passed, finally contravening one of them. Until then, the Children’s Law Reform Act, which designated how adoptive parents were named and recognized, conferred parenthood to mothers and fathers, and to sperm donors before partners in the province. To assure guardianship of their child, couples would need to apply for a second parent adoption, a process in which the donor would need to actively resign their rights and a member of the family would need to appeal the courts for guardianship. This law arose from Cy and Ruby’s Act, a bill named for a family that, after a harrowing childbirth, feared they would lose guardianship of their child because the laws didn’t automatically recognize a same-sex co-parent. Ontario is the fifth Canadian province to implement parental recognition legislation, following Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec, and B.C.

This legal victory for queer families in Canada came when Thompson’s daughter was already more than than a year old. When she was still navigating the waters of known versus anonymous donorship, there was hardly a dilemma. She and her partner were lucky: Situated in a major urban area in Toronto, as they were, they had access to queer parenting resources and a cluster of fertility clinics and counsel. But none of the lawyers she asked could tell her declaratively how a known donorship would affect her family. At that point, a known donor had de facto guardianship. How could they avoid peril to her partner’s parentship application to the courts? And what of the duty to consult? If her band chose to intervene, what recourse did they have? “It was really important to us from the outset that we were able to reflect our family’s cultural identity. So for us, we had to weigh out the desire to have Indigenous sperm from our area or someone who identified as Ojibwe as our sperm donor with the risks with a known donor,” Thompson says. “In the end we decided to not go with a known donor because the system didn’t seem equipped to support our family.”

Handling issues like donor diversity hasn’t proven feasible under existing regulations. Without the offer of compensation, recruiting volunteers to submit to regular health screenings, waves of ejaculatory abstinence, and the time to commute to the receiving clinic in Etobicoke hasn’t panned out. Furthermore, willing donors are turned away. As with blood donation, men who have sex with men are barred from donating sperm anonymously. And the requirement of a three-generation medical history may hinder Indigenous men, who are overrepresented in child welfare systems and might not know their history that far back, from becoming donors.

Organizations from queer community centre The 519 to the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) have decried the AHRA’s disproportionate impact on queer families. The CBA’s Family and Health Law Section and the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Community Forum also acknowledge that the exponential rise of reproductive technology would almost surely outpace the bill’s reason. Stiff penalties apply; paying a sperm donor or surrogate can earn one $500,000 in fines and a 10-year prison sentence.

The lack of proportionality in these measures is being pursued by some in the legal community who are addressing its deficits, from the confounding to the discriminatory. “If you are looking for a white healthy person, that’s an option. But if you are looking for anything beyond that, it becomes incredibly difficult in Canada to access gametes from any other racial or other background,” says Sara Cohen, a Toronto-based fertility lawyer involved with the AHRA/LGBTQ Working Group. “If you or your partner are non-caucasian and would like a specific racial background or heritage reflected in the genetic makeup of your child, you are down to a couple of donors at best—the same couple of donors as are available to everyone else in your community,” she wrote on the Fertility Law Canada blog. “Across the board for any racialized family who is active in LGBTQ communities, they kind of go through their mental Rolodex of who they know and guess that they’ve probably used the same donor,” adds Inkster.

But even if the working group’s consultations yield results for prospective queer parents—training their clinicians and counsellors in culturally competent care for those patients— that’s still only a piece of the question. Of all the clinics they deal with, “There are none that are aligned with Indigenous health principles—with clinicians who are aligned with that modality and trained in culturally safe care for Indigenous folks,” Inkster says. “I’ve never heard a clinician say to me, ‘We’re considering culturally safe care for Indigenous communities.’” He figures it’s likely a matter of place—fertility clinics in Canada are concentrated by density. Kingston, Ont. has none. There is one per Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

It’s a rather uncharted area of reproductive justice. Birth control, abortion, and other areas of health care are scantily accessible in Canada’s more remote regions. With IVF costing anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000, the added cost of travel to an urban hub can make an already prohibitive means of starting a family insurmountable.

“The way that Indigenous people look at families is very different than sort of this Western format of what family looks like,” says Denise Booth McLeod, an Indigenous full-spectrum doula, noting how common adoption and extended kinship ties are in her community. “I have other friends who are talking about when they’re planning on having babies who are already in talks with people within our community: ‘Okay, you’re Indigenous; we’re Indigenous. How do we sort of source your product? How do we do this in a way where it feels right for us as a family?’”

***

For Thompson and families like hers, how can an area like this be problematized? Reproductive justice and health inequity aside, now there’s a child. A living and loved manifestation of laborious decision-making, unexpected relics of the Indian Act, the spillover of second parent adoption laws. Recognition of the complexities of second parent adoptions and its obsolescence after the passage of the All Families Are Equal Act could change course for future families. “That new development I think could be a bit of a game changer,” she says.

In the end, she used an American donor with Indigenous ancestry. Once she and her partner decided that was important to them, it narrowed the selection down to a small pool.

At the time of publication, ReproMed, Canada’s largest sperm bank, had zero Indigenous-identified donors. Not much has changed since Pruden first donated his sperm in the 1990s. He has wondered intermittently over the years about what became of his sperm. A culture of immense racism, internalized, may have meant that some Indigenous families wouldn’t have had the pride in their identities and culture to motivate them to so deliberately expand their lineages in this way, passing down all that came with it, he says.

But today, identity remains a terrain to navigate. “One of the things that happens in the community is there’s a huge focus on who you are and where you’ve come from. And so I think about that for her,” Thompson says. Her Anishnabe family is her daughter’s family. “We’ll talk about that and that’s who she’ll grow up with.”

“We’re happy with the little person we got.”

UPDATE, MAY 25: This story has been updated, removing language surrounding the ancestry of the Thompson family’s sperm donor to protect their privacy.