Guest Post: Making It Up As We Go - A Queer Parent's View

An essay by recipient parent and author Eli Ramos

Regular readers know that my posts focus on research, with the occasional personal essays, tidbits from the news, and book recaps, all in service of understanding the complex landscape of donor conception. And you’ve probably noticed that I value qualitative data—the stories, experiences, and lived realities—as deeply as I do quantitative research.

As a parent, I find myself trying to synthesize empirical evidence, experiential wisdom, and theoretical frameworks to shape my intentions for raising my children. It's intellectually demanding work, but more than that, it can be profoundly isolating. Too often, online spaces reduce these complex realities to binary positions—us versus them, right versus wrong, bioessentialism versus social constructionism—leaving little room for the nuanced conversations our families desperately need. This is why I'm grateful for folks who share openly the real complexities and contradictions modern-day donor conception families navigate, the things no one tells you about when you begin this journey.

Today’s post features writing from Eli Ramos, a queer, non-binary, multiracial, non-genetic, non-gestational recipient parent who has just published a book about their experience raising a young child as part of a large same-donor family cohort. While our identities differ greatly, I found so much of their experience resonated.

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Making It Up As We Go: A Queer Parent's View

By

Eli Ramos

“This is just one of many systems we live within that were not built with families like ours in mind. It can feel unsafe to admit fears about not being enough when there are still debates about whether families like ours should exist at all. Sometimes, I feel stuck between self-preservation and progress.”

This tension defines much of my parenting journey as a queer, nonbinary, multiracial, nonbiological recipient parent in the United States. How much weight should I place on my son’s genetics – on our sperm donor – and why has this become such a lightning rod for cultural battles? At its core, it’s the classic question of nature versus nurture, but with donor conception, we’re asking it in deeply personal ways.

Building Our Family

When my wife and I started our family-building process, we chose donor conception because it felt like both the simplest way for us to go about having a child (it was less discriminatory and invasive than adoption) and because it felt like the only way to have a family that belonged just to us.

A family that belonged just to us.

This idea, I think, was rooted in fear. If you’re anything like me, the dissenting voices are always there in the background. I hear people saying all children deserve two parents, specifically a mom and a dad, and some take this one step further to say children should be raised by their two genetic parents. I hear people saying that queer people shouldn’t be parents. I hear people saying that my nonbinary identity is invalid (that’s a kind way of putting it) and confusing to children. This kind of fear is pervasive in my life, and the idea of being able to have a family via donor conception felt safest. The man involved was out of the picture for at least 18 years.

My wife and I agonized over the cryobank and sperm donor selection process and had what felt like a million and one conversations before we ever even tried getting pregnant. I’m not sure why donor-conceived perspectives never factored into our conversations or preparation. At the time, there was so much focus on the process of having a child in the first place and a lot of fear that the dream of parenthood might never come to fruition for us. It is an extremely vulnerable position to be in, and one that makes it all too easy to overlook (or ignore) the red flags that may arise in the process of having a child through a cryobank or fertility clinic.

After the long nine-month process of trying to conceive before receiving our first positive pregnancy test, we peeked behind the curtain and fell fast into a world that was previously unknown to us. When we found our child’s sibling group, just after the first trimester of the pregnancy, there were already twelve other families. Although we had been curious, we hadn’t been prepared in any way for the realities of being connected with the other families and children. It’s brought unexpected joy, memorable meetups, and surprising disclosures. It’s raised a million questions with no clear answers.

Finding My Way

It’s hard to navigate such emotional and deeply personal territory with no guideposts to lead the way. But I’ve been here before. When I was growing up, gay marriage wasn’t legal, and queer parenthood felt like an oxymoron or an exception to the rule. Obergefell v. Hodges passed when I was in my early twenties, and it opened up a new world of possibilities. When I came out as nonbinary a decade ago, that word wasn’t even part of the cultural lexicon. I used “genderqueer” back then, and there were hardly any (out) nonbinary public figures or other examples for me to follow. I am living a life unlike any queer American before me, and in a lot of ways, I am making it up as I go. By making it up, I mean not shying away from difficult questions, engaging in dialogue, and striving for authenticity and kindness.

I feel the same as a recipient parent. Although donor conception has been a practice for over a hundred years, it wasn’t until over-the-counter DNA kits began unearthing long-held family (or practitioner) secrets that stories from donor-conceived people really began to emerge. On the parent end, I don’t know many other families who are connected to their child’s donor-conceived half-siblings, much less approaching these kinds of relationships the way my family is. The stories I typically hear ring of true-crime and usually revolve around nefarious fertility practitioners or serial sperm donors.

There isn’t much research to guide modern-day recipient parents either. Donor conception has been historically secretive and shrouded in mystery with the goal of preserving parental egos. Now, as parents who know more, we are trying to do better, but we have no research to help guide us. Storytelling is the main way we gather and share information in this community, which is beautiful, but we need real data, too. We need investment in research into modern-day donor-conceived people, families, and their donors. That’s one of the ways we can create a better future.

An Invitation to Engage

In conversations about donor conception, people are often pressured to take a side (or at least appear to), but I’m not here to take sides because that assumes there is a correct answer. Instead, I’m here to ask the questions, to hold nuance, and to imagine a way forward in conversation with the many intersecting communities who share this space. I want to continue asking: how do we create more ethical systems of donor conception and how do we center the voices of donor-conceived people in making these changes? Then, for families like mine, how do we take the new information we have and use it to inform the ways we raise our children?

In my memoir, My Son’s Siblings: A Queer Parent’s Memoir on the Joys, Grief, and Ethics of Donor Conception, I dive deep into these lived contradictions in language, family, identity, and ethics, and I show what it can look like to parent a donor-conceived child with intention.

My understanding of donor conception has evolved over the past few years, and I’m not afraid to admit my initial shortcomings and narrowness of thought. I have been shocked to learn everything I have about the fertility industry and donor conception after believing I had gone into our family-building journey well-equipped. I’m sharing my story in the hopes that it helps others along this path consider family – the ways we build and raise them – in new ways.

My book is a practice in asking questions, managing insecurity, finding peace in uncertainty, and creating a new way forward. I invite you to keep having conversations, listen generously, hold nuance, and find ways to live authentically.

You can find Eli on Instagram (@eliramos_author) and on Substack at

Eli Ramos

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Note: I read a pre-publication version of the memoir and do not receive any financial benefit from the links to the book.