Gay Dads to Be: Reflections on Gender, Sexuality, Family, and Race in Adoption and Surrogacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prospective gay fathers must carefully prepare, plan, and think about parenting—often for years—before they become parents. This article explores how different paths to parenthood provide opportunities for Canadian gay men to reflect upon their preferences for surrogacy or adoption, the meaning of fatherhood in the absence of a woman as a primary caregiver, and the opportunities and potential shortcomings of gay fatherhood. Based on analysis of 23 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Canadian prospective gay fathers, I show that adoption and surrogacy foster different degrees of reflection along the journey to fatherhood. I argue that gay men who pursue surrogacy express masculine competence and draw upon scripts of conventional fatherhood, while gay men who pursue adoption experience a disruption in their masculine competence and must reflect on their potential inadequacies as male parents. Further, I include a brief discussion of some counterevidence: these pressures on the journey to gay fatherhood can be resisted through a queer, anti-racist, and feminist consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".