Queer Kinship Practices in Non‐Western Contexts: French Polynesia's Gender‐variant Parents and the Law of La République
| Author | Aleardo Zanghellini |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00525.x |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 37, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2010
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 651±77
Queer Kinship Practices in Non-Western Contexts:
French Polynesia's Gender-variant Parents and the
Law of La Re
Âpublique
Aleardo Zanghellini*
French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France whose kinship
practices accommodate transgender parenting through the involve-
ment of gender-variant (mahu) people in childrearing, including as
adoptive parents in customary (faamu) adoption. While the existence
and visibility of gender-variant people in French Polynesia is well
documented, there is no literature on their involvement in parenting,
reflecting a more general dearth of research on LGBT parenting in
non-Western contexts. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in French
Polynesia, this article fills this gap. The article also discusses the
negative implications of France's ambivalence towards LGBT
parenting for French Polynesian gender-variant parents and the
children they raise.
INTRODUCTION
Despite the fact that the European Court of Human Rights recently held that
homosexuality was not an acceptable ground for denying an application for
adoption by a lesbian woman as a single parent,
1
LGBT parenting remains a
divisive issue in Europe. While the United Kingdom, for example, provides
lesbians and gay men with a range of legal avenues enabling them to become
parents and facilitating their legal recognition as parents,
2
the law in many
other members of the Council of Europe remains unsympathetic to LGBT
parenting. France's ambivalence towards gay parenting, in particular, is not
651
ß2010 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2010 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*School of Law, University of Reading, Foxhill House, Whiteknights Road,
Earley, Reading RG6 7BA, England
a.zanghellini@reading.ac.uk
1E.B. v. France (App. No. 43546/02) (22 January 2008).
2 The most recent illustration being the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act
2008 (ch. 22), ss. 43, 42, 54.
only inequitable to LGBT parents residing in metropolitan France, but is also
likely to have detrimental effects far away from Europe. Transgender parent-
ing has traditionally been a relatively frequent, if hitherto undocumented,
occurrence in French Polynesia. While this tradition continues as a social
reality, France's stance on LGBT parenting discourages its legal recognition
and undermines Polynesian transgender parenting as a social practice.
There are good reasons for treating transgender and gay parenting under
the common rubric of LGBT parenting. While gay parenting has been more
politically salient in recent years, transgender parenting is vulnerable to the
same (unsubstantiated) objections made to gay parenting, even where trans-
gender parents do not identify as same-gender attracted. Thus, gender con-
fusion and peer difficulties, routinely invoked by the critics of gay parenting
as likely consequences of it,
3
are also used as a weapon against transgender
parents.
4
Also, because opposition to gay parenting tends to proceed from
essentialist understandings of manhood, womanhood, and their comple-
mentarity, those who object to gay parenting are likely to respond negatively
to the idea of transgender parents, whose very being disrupts the neatness of
the M/F binary. In particular, like gay parents, transgender parents may be
seen as incapable of providing the benefits of `dual gender parenting'.
5
And,
like gay parents, they may well be seen at risk of producing gay children,
6
for the discontinuity between their birth sex and gender identification
prevents their relationships and desires from being read as `heterosexual' in
any simple sense. Finally, the (flawed) evolutionary psychology-based argu-
ment that non-biological parenting is less nurturing
7
applies as easily to most
instances of transgender parenting as it does to gay parenting. For these
reasons, legal and societal debates about transgender parenting are bound up
with the controversy about gay parenting, and vice-versa, although this link
has not received much attention.
In what follows, I first contextualize my discussion by detailing the process
through which European human rights law came to view LGBT parenting as a
matter of human rights. I then analyse France's lack of serious commitment to
recognizing LGBT parenting. After discussing the Polynesian tradition of
non-biological parenting, I explain how it accommodates forms of
transgender parenting. Finally, I argue that French laws and judicial practices
on LGBT parenting negatively affect Polynesian transgender parenting.
652
3L.D. Wardle, `The Potential Impact of Homosexual Parenting on Children' (1997)
University of Illinois Law Rev. 833, at 852, 855, 859, 863.
4See R. Green, `Transsexual Legal Rights in the United States and United Kingdom:
Employment, Medical Treatment, and Civil Status' (2010) 39 Archives of Sexual
Behaviour 153±60; R. Green, `Transsexuals' Children' (1998) 2 International J. of
Transgenderism.
5Wardle, op. cit., n. 3, p. 852.
6 id., pp. 848, 850, 865.
7S.Callahan, `Gays, Lesbians and the Use of Alternate Reproductive Technologies'
in Feminism and Families,ed. H. Nelson (1997) 188.
ß2010 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2010 Cardiff University Law School
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