During the pandemic, I came out as Queer and 2 Spirit, and the self-discovery didn’t stop there. It pulled me into research, reading, and a Gender Exploration group. What I heard in those rooms shaped everything that followed.
One pattern came up again and again, mine included. Most of my millennial and millennial-adjacent peers didn’t realize their gender was something other than the one they’d been assigned at birth until they were already deep in a relationship or marriage.
A second pattern echoed the first. People who had spent their lives assuming they were straight discovered they weren’t, yet they were still in love with their partner. The love didn’t have to end; the contract had to change. Some couples re-evaluated what each person actually needed. Some opened their relationships on one side, or both, so that each partner could meet a same-sex or all-gender partner without lying about it.
When couples and families choose polyamory, the people closest to them often respond with cruelty rather than curiosity.
I heard the same story from too many men: they could not be openly Bi because toxic masculinity wouldn’t let them. So I gave that struggle to Ben. Bisexual people of every gender face skepticism, but women, for whatever reason, are met with more grace. Men get hostility from straight and gay communities alike.
Sam, Ben, and Christian are a rare configuration, but they are not a fictional one. Families like theirs exist, and they are happy, and they are, in every way that matters, a modern family. Normalization is the door. Without it, acceptance stays out of reach and the stigma keeps doing its work.
Non-traditional families were finally gaining ground until the current US administration began painting these communities as something to fear. The people being erased deserve more than survival. They deserve stories that put them on the page honestly, in full, and without apology.