This left me with my trusty headlamp, my speculum, and sperm donated by an old friend from growing up — a gay man who also planned to love my baby. In what was becoming our own weird tradition, I cooked him dinner and then left to walk my dog while he ejaculated into a red plastic solo cup. After my friend let himself out of my apartment, I began “washing” the sample he left on my bathroom counter, a procedure that separates the sperm from the semen surrounding it, using a $60 centrifuge I purchased from a science supply store.

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I tried to inseminate at least twice per menstrual cycle, and it became so routine that my friend once accidentally blurted out that he needed to go jerk off at my place when a coworker asked why he wasn’t staying late for a team dinner. It was pure queer magic. I became pregnant after nearly a year of this.

My pregnancy, sadly, ended in stillbirth, for reasons totally unrelated to how I became pregnant (I contracted cytomegalovirus, a common virus that causes mild cold-like symptoms in adults but can be lethal for a fetus). Like many relationships that are tested by stillbirth and grief, my friend and I are no longer close. Certainly not close enough to resume trading a home-cooked meal for a party cup of semen.

Adoption was actually my first choice for parenting, but it is not friendly to low-income people. It often costs $20,00 to $40,000 or more for private domestic adoptions, and fostering or adopting through the deeply flawed child welfare system involves an extensive assessment process that costs around $900 to $3,000. Though grants and other forms of financial assistance are often available for the assessment itself, it’s likely that evaluators would count my poverty, my small apartment, my queerness, my disability, my background and beliefs as a radical activist, and even my sweet old pit bull as strikes against me. So for me to be a parent — for me to get to experience the sweetness of morning cuddles, the endless questions and challenges, the beautiful and mundane care work of guiding new life across a dying world — pregnancy is my best option.

However, without the ready access to fresh sperm that my friend provided, getting pregnant again will be expensive as hell. In addition to purchasing the sperm itself, which often retails for more than $850 a vial, there are storage fees ($350 per year), shipping fees ($180), and fees for viewing donor profiles ($50 for three months). All for a single attempt at insemination.

And it usually doesn’t stop at just one vial: Even for people in their 20s and early 30s, when it is generally easier to conceive, IUI has a success rate of less than 20 percent per attempt, and typically needs to be tried multiple times. In fact, in one study, only 24 percent of people had a live birth after 3 cycles of IUI, even when they attempted two IUIs per menstrual cycle. And while the birth rate rises with more IUI attempts, so does the cost.

In other words, even assuming the bare minimum cost for each IUI attempt, three attempts at IUI could cost $3,490, for a one-in-four chance of becoming pregnant.

And that’s just the sperm. Conception-related health care is also expensive, with costs for IUI in a clinic ranging from $250 to $4000 per attempt. Fertility specialists recommend moving to in vitro fertilization (IVF), which begins at $12,000 to $15,000, after three unsuccessful IUI cycles. Insurance companies, however, often demand that prospective LGBTQ parents “prove” their infertility by paying out of pocket for six or more in-clinic IUIs before providing insurance coverage for IVF (self-insemination doesn’t count towards this total). This means that, even with insurance, queer people might have to spend over $30,000 ($6,580 on sperm and another $24,000 on clinic fees) before their insurance begins to cover fertility care. (Straight, cisgender couples, in contrast, typically receive coverage if they report having unprotected sex for 6 months to a year.) For people who rely on surrogacy, the costs often start at six figures in the U.S.

These costs are obviously not an option for low-income people. So, we either don’t have kids or we get creative. Hence the duct tape.

Studies show that queer people want children at the same rate as straight people, but our access to parenthood is limited by our statistically lower incomes and, for those of us who don’t produce it, the price of sperm. The high cost of fertility treatments like IUI is often significantly, disproportionally burdensome for queer people, who are more likely than our cishet counterparts to live in poverty, especially if we are people of color, trans, gender nonconforming, or women.

Queer people like me are also more likely to have or acquire disabilities — in my case a brain injury from police brutality. Disabled people are almost twice as likely to experience poverty, with even higher poverty rates among disabled women, gender minorities, LGBTQ folks, and people of color. People who receive certain disability benefits can lose them if they ever amass assets worth more than $2000, which prevents disabled people from saving up for sperm, pregnancy, or parenting.

Sperm banking is a big business, with profits reported at almost 4.8 billion globally. Sperm banks are just one facet of the rapidly growing — and incredibly profitable — fertility industry, valued at 8 billion dollars in the U.S. alone. This industry is prone to predatory behavior, and increasingly controlled by venture capitalists.

Regulation might help with this, especially if it was designed to explicitly protect queer families and other oppressed groups. In addition, there is no reason to require people to undergo psychological evaluations (another expense) nor get a physician’s permission to purchase and receive sperm, though many sperm banks and clinics do.

Currently, just one state (New York) extends fertility coverage to people on Medicaid, the largest insurer of people living in poverty; fertility coverage for people on Medicaid must be extended nation-wide. Further, only 19 states mandate that private insurance companies cover any kind of fertility-related services. As described above, insurance industry policies often result in queer people having to pay dramatically more for care than straight couples.

A recent lawsuit against Aetna Health claimed this disparity constitutes a violation of Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which bans insurance companies and health care entities from discriminating on the basis of sex. Though Aetna updated their policy within days of the lawsuit, Section 1557 should continue to be applied to ensure equitable treatment of LGBTQ health care consumers, including when it comes to building our families. I also want more legislation, such as the law recently enacted in Illinois, designed to prevent queer parents from having to pay more than our cishet counterparts to access fertility treatment.

Until we have equitable policies that protect us, queer people will care for each other, including helping each other build families. I started teaching friends and neighbors in my local queer community how to wash sperm and perform IUIs on themselves and their partners, usually in exchange for beer and pizza. Many of my friends were using known donors for the same reasons I had: cost. Even folks who were using sperm banks often wanted to do their own IUIs to save money after the outrageous amount they had spent acquiring each precious vial of semen.

I still dream of parenting, but it seems more and more out of reach as I approach 40 and my credit card debt gets worse, not better. I know I’d be a good parent, in that I would love my child hard, with the same drive that had me taping a mirror to my bathtub and processing semen in a centrifuge meant for high school chemistry classrooms. What stops me is not doubt, or even exhaustion, but the cost of being beautifully queer in a world that privileges heterosexuality.

This November, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which will decide whether foster and adoption placement agencies have the right to use their religious beliefs as an excuse not to comply with nondiscrimination protections.

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In 2018, the Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS), the city’s child services department, stopped referring prospective foster and adoptive parents to Catholic Social Services for certification and oversight after a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer revealed that the agency was actively discriminating against gay and lesbian couples for religious reasons. When Catholic Social Services refused to change their stance on licensing queer foster parents, the city allowed their foster certification contract to lapse; the subsequent lawsuit, which is now pending before the Supreme Court, claims that the city violated their religious freedoms by ending their contract for this reason.

Barrett has expressed a number of beliefs in her public life that suggest bias against the LGBTQ community. She was a signatory on a letter to the Catholic leadership expressing commitment toward “the significance of sexual difference and the complementarity of men and women…and on marriage and family founded on the indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman.” She described the application of Title IX protections to transgender people as a “strain,” and has openly opposed marriage equality. She was also faculty for the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which is run by a law firm whose executive director recently argued for reestablishing criminal penalties for consensual queer sex.

Fulton is not the only way in which LGBTQ rights within the foster system have been questioned this year. An executive order issued by President Trump in late June, titled “Strengthening the Child Welfare System for America’s Children,” does not directly address the upcoming Supreme Court case, but it does seek to solidify the rights of faith-based organizations to work in the child services field, and to clearly solidify their First Amendment rights to engage in this work — the very argument up for debate with the Supreme Court.

The order states: “This guidance shall also make clear that faith-based organizations are eligible for partnerships under title IV–E of the Act (42 U.S.C. 670 et seq.), on an equal basis, consistent with the First Amendment to the Constitution.” It is this same brand of messaging that has surfaced repeatedly in Barrett’s opinions related to LGBTQ rights, and on the rights of the Catholic Church to exact its views on society at large.

“It’s really critical and important to note…the language used,” said Alexandra Citrin, senior associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy. “The language in the Executive Order might appear harmless, but what we’ve seen from this Administration is consistent undermining of certain communities including those who are LGBTQ+, Black, immigrant, etc. and prioritizing who they believe should be foster and adoptive parents. We are likely going to see guidance that emphasizes partnerships for faith-based organizations — including those that use federal dollars to discriminate.”

That creates anxiety for LGBTQ families, who have only recently gained the right to foster and adopt. It was not until 1997 that the first state in the country, New Jersey, officially allowed same-sex couples to adopt statewide. Florida was the last state to overturn its anti-gay adoption policies in 2010.

“The concerns that LGBT adults have about whether or not they’re going to be discriminated against have not gone away,” said Stephanie Haynes, executive director of Philadelphia Family Pride, which is a co-appellee in the Catholic Social Services case. “You can imagine families in same-sex couples would decide not to become foster parents at all because of the risk of being turned away, not only because they do not want to subject themselves to that but also for families with kids already, they would involve their kids in discussions about the possibility of having foster kids in the home, and want to protect their kids from that possible discrimination from the foster care process.”

LGBTQ foster and adoptive parents are not the only queer group who face discrimination in the foster system, though they have received the most attention and study in the field. LGBTQ youth, for example, remain overrepresented in the child welfare system, and are at heightened risk for homelessness. And one study of low-income Black mothers found that those who identified as lesbian or bisexual were 4.19 times more likely to lose custody of their children than heterosexual Black women, a population already subject to racial disproportionality within the system.

Nancy Polikoff, a professor of Law Emerita at American University Washington College of Law, said that discrimination “can be obvious, as in not recognizing who the child’s family members are, but it can also be more subtle.” She cited a case in Kansas in which a lesbian mother was told by her case worker, who was employed by the faith-based agency St. Francis Community Services, that she needed to be “fixed” so that she would not spread her queerness to her child. Ultimately, her parental rights were terminated. While her orientation was not cited as the reason that her children were removed from her home, interactions between her and the case worker indicate that it likely played a role.

Similar concerns exist for transgender children. “We have had a number of cases where parents who have, in particular, trans children end up having their child removed because they are supporting their children’s gender identity,” said Cathy Sakimura, family law director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case. “We recently had a case where a very low income mother lost all of her children; they were all removed because one of her children was gender non-conforming…There really wasn’t anything else other than some vague allegation about the home being dirty, and all of the testimony — everything that was presented — was all about the child and whether the child was given feminine clothing.”

“There are great faith-based organizations that partner with child welfare agencies and do it well; the problem is there are some faith-based organizations that discriminate…against what foster parents they will license, which can limit who can be licensed – for example, if there is only one licensing agency in the community, an aunt might not be able to be licensed to care for their niece if the agency doesn’t agree with her identity. And, it also raises into question how these are supporting the diverse identities of youth in foster care,” said Citrin.

If Barrett’s confirmation is successful, her placement could tip the Supreme Court in the direction of anti-LGBTQ policymaking. The ruling on Fulton v. City of Philadelphia will undoubtedly have dire impacts on children caught up in the foster system, but a broad enough decision could also open the doors for discrimination in any social service setting that contracts with agencies that cite their religion as an excuse to discriminate, including homeless shelters and food banks. It is impossible to predict how Barrett will vote on the case; however, several of her past actions showcase clear bias.

The case is currently pending before the Supreme Court, and arguments are set to begin just after Election Day. In the meantime, Catholic Social Services is still contracted with Philadelphia DHS to conduct case management for system-involved families of origin.

There are currently almost half a million children in foster care in the United States, 123,000 of whom are waiting to be adopted. Child welfare data indicate that approximately 23 percent of children in foster care identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer, like Alex.

In the state of South Carolina, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently waived federal nondiscrimination policy for foster care and adoption. While South Carolina is the only state that has been granted such a waiver to date, there are 10 states — Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia — that use federal dollars to support private faith-based agencies, even when those agencies discriminate against foster and adoptive parents who do not share their stated religious values.

There has been a lot written on the principles of this policy. But much less has been said about whether these agencies are even able to effectively do their jobs.

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Delaying, or even preventing, placement with permanent families — which agencies do by default when they restrict the pool of available families — can have life-long consequences for kids in foster care. Every year, about 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system without being adopted, leaving them with fewer educational and employment opportunities, and more likely to experience homelessness, become pregnant early, lack access to health care, and become involved in the criminal justice system.

There is also a more nuanced question as to whether agencies that discriminate against prospective parents are capable of supporting the diverse children  —  children of varying religious backgrounds, races, ethnicities, abilities, gender identities, and sexual orientations  —  that make up the foster care population.

Optimally, the foster and adoptive parents working with states should reflect the same diversity as the children they serve, and most importantly, every foster parent a state works with should be able to support, affirm, and meet the needs of any child in care. The demographics of children in foster care, and foster and adoptive parents, look different in every state. However, children of color and children who identify as LGBTQ+ are disproportionality involved in child welfare systems and experience disparities while there. There is also incredible diversity in the faith needs of children in foster care. Many young people express the desire to be connected to their faith community. This is a critical part of a young person’s identity, and the only faith and spirituality needs that should be taken into account are theirs.

Studies have found that attention to a child’s identity is core to promoting health and well-being — and that doing so has an impact on their success and stability as adults. For example, research has demonstrated that providing children of color with opportunities to cultivate a positive relationship with their ethnic and racial identity can serve as a protective factor, offsetting trauma, increasing self-esteem, and helping to mitigate the effects of racial discrimination. Research also shows that acknowledging and affirming youth’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression is critically important to a young person’s health and well-being, and promotes both safety and their success in foster and adoptive homes.

In reference to South Carolina’s new order, Erin Hall, a former provider and the previous CEO of the Palmetto Association for Children and Families, stated, “Finding foster and adoptive homes is about matching a child’s needs with a family. In South Carolina, we have put the preference of one faith-based agency ahead of the mission of child welfare. This is not reflective of what we know is in the best interest of kids or what most of the faith-based service providers in South Carolina believe is right.”

When child welfare agencies prioritize the needs of faith-based agencies over children, that restricts their ability to recruit and license loving and affirming foster and adoptive homes, there are significant negative consequences for children. Alex’s experience is one example.

In Alex’s case, by placing a young child in a home that was not affirming, she grew up without the support that foster and adoptive parents have committed to provide, and the state has committed to establish.

Child welfare experts, including many faith-based providers, know that these religious refusal laws hurt children. Unfortunately, the current political climate, and the too often unchecked power state governors and legislators have over the policies that govern child welfare systems, is likely to lead to more religious refusal in the future. Texas’ attorney general has now asked for a waiver to exempt religious groups in his state. In Pennsylvania, several lawmakers, without going through their governor, sent a request for such a waiver directly to HHS. These actions may respond to the desires of some providers, but is not aligned with the majority of faith-based child welfare providers and is firmly outside of the norms of child welfare best practice.

Lena Wilson, vice president of the children and families division at Samaritas, one of the largest faith-based providers in Michigan, described what she saw as the obligation of organizations like hers in the wake of the passage of a religious refusal law in her state: “We as agencies have to be vigilant to ensure all of our children and families are served without discrimination. Currently discriminatory legislation is being passed in the dead of night, which further marginalizes our LGBTQ youth and families and denies them equal access to services that they deserve.”

*Name was changed for privacy.

This goal—and the plan for how to get there—are bullshit.

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Let’s talk about the goal first: a stable two-parent family. Brooks is feeding the narrative that there is an ideal kind of family—one that does best, one that is how people should be. It’s a family with two married parents. It’s a family in which people have children and mostly women raise them. It’s a family in which no one dies or is infertile or is incarcerated. It’s a family in which no one decides to stay single or childless or get divorced.

It is, in short, not reality. And making policy around this idealized vision of family has very real, often terrible consequences.

First, there is the emotional toll. When there is one ideal, people are crucified for falling short. They are blamed and marginalized. Their families are vilified and demonized. We have seen this with black single moms during welfare reform, gay parents during the same sex marriage movement, and now families with disabilities as policymakers seek to cut benefits. This helps no one.

Second, policies that focus on this idealized family, which account for less than one-fifth of American households, leave out the needs of tons of other families. We saw this last fall, when the Trump campaign floated a paid leave plan that only applied to birth mothers. The plan not only left out adoptive parents and male parents, it also ignored the needs of people caring for aging or disabled loved ones, sick children, their partners, or themselves.

Third, it can waste a ton of money. Jennifer Randles’s work reveals that though the nation has spent close to a billion dollars on programs that promote marriage over the last two decades, “couples who took government-funded relationship skills classes were neither more likely to marry or stay together nor to improve their financial situations.”

Fourth, policies aimed at keeping people married can trap people in dangerous relationships—even kill them. Perhaps the starkest example is the dramatic changes in women’s well-being after the passage of no-fault divorce. Research by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers shows that in states that passed no-fault divorce laws, suicide rates among wives decreased by 8 to 16 percent and domestic violence rates fell by 30 percent.

Even if we set Brooks’s dubious two-parents-a-dog-and-a-white-picket-fence goal aside, the policies he mentions would fall short of what any kind of family needs. His proposals to “help” families focus on changing individual choices without mentioning the systems that override them. Brooks fails to mention how America’s incarceration system is dividing families, particularly black families. He doesn’t address the fact that our nation’s immigration policies are literally ripping families apart. He does not discuss the importance of health care, good jobs, or reproductive care—all of which have been linked to strong and stable families. A few programs and a social script are not going to cut it.

Instead of this harmful, narrow vision of family, we should be looking for ways to value and support a whole range of healthy, stable families. Some are single parents. Some are couples without children. Some are brothers taking care of sisters, grandparents caring for children, extended chosen families. All of these families deserve support and appreciation.

When you have a broader vision of family, you can make the kind of policy choices that actually support everyone. And you can also make clear to all kinds of families that they are not less than or inadequate—and they deserve to have their needs met.

And for about 24 hours, maybe more, they didn’t stop.

Many LGBTQ people know what it’s like to feel rejected. Too many know what it’s like to be attacked. But to feel terrorized was a sensation that many of us weren’t familiar with. A year later, we are still grappling with it.

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I remember reading through the last names of those who were killed and seriously injured that evening. Those last names looked just like mine, and like those of the people I love and consider my chosen family. These gorgeous Latinx people went to a club—which has always been our safe place—to celebrate their community, to dance and release their inhibitions, and to be understood. Their freedom to express who they were, their right to create space in a world that didn’t always celebrate them, was brutally stomped out. There is no reconciling that.

That morning, I called my mom, wrote a piece on Medium, and then went to church. I sat with a friend, in my usual pew at St. Augustine’s—center aisle, four rows from the back—and listened to the chorale sing about love, piety, and stewardship. After the second hymn, I felt the lump begin to form in my throat and I started to cry again. Seated in a beautiful house of worship, surrounded by stained glass and marble, I felt robbed of something sacred to me: my sense of safety. I know that many of my friends felt the same way I did, and some still do.

I dragged myself into the office the next day, knowing it would be painful. I didn’t get much work done that day—at least, not as it was written in my job description. Instead, I helped fill our biggest conference room with staff who needed to feel heard and safe. We shared stories about ourselves, about our families, about being survivors of other horrifying acts of gun violence, about solidarity. The raw emotion shown in that room was so powerful. We cried and held one another, and we were honest with our allies about our fears. We gave each other what we needed that day: reassurance and compassion.

In the year that has passed since the Pulse shooting, we have learned a lot about our country. We have learned that homophobic politicians will do whatever is best for them, including ignoring the identities of the people we lost that night. We have learned that the gun lobby will use any tragedy to encourage the proliferation of gun use. We have learned that it continues to be dangerous to exist in this world as Latinx and LGBTQ, let alone both. And we have learned that the pettiness of Donald Trump, who thanked people for congratulating him “for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” instead of mourning the 49 lives we lost, knows no bounds.

But the most important lesson we have learned is that the LGBTQ community is strong. We are resilient. We are beautiful. We are politically powerful. No mad man, or coalition of racists or homophobes, can take from us what we manifest in each other: unapologetic love.