Reading the big piece on the YouTubers who gave up their autistic adopted son in The Cut, and can I tell you how much I hate the term "Gotcha Day" as an adopted person? It's really fucking gross. Stop doing it. https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/youtube-myka-james-stauffer-huxley-adoption.html

Stories about adoption in our culture _still_ center the stories of adoptive parents over those of adoptees or biological parents. It contributes to situations where abusive or neglectful adoptive parents see their choice to adopt as so good it overrides everything else.

There are LOTS of good adoptive parents. I may adopt myself someday. Adoption is something we need!

But the white evangelical Christian narrative of adoption reduces a child's agency and turns them into a vessel for God's will for their parents instead of a human being.

I do not know an adopted person who isn't at least a little fucked up by some of this. Even those with THE BEST parents have some sort of abandonment stuff somewhere, because tiny brains can't quite perceive why they're being "taken" from their mothers.

The best adoptive parents make room for this and help their kids get therapy and reassure them how loved they are and just generally do all the things good parents should do for their kids.

The worst just ask us to celebrate a foundational tragedy in the name of "destiny."

I try not to talk about this on main, but my own parents had a huge emotional attachment to the idea of adopting a "son," and when I tried to suggest otherwise as a kid, things went poorly. They loved an idea of me instead of ME, and the fallout led to so much pain.

There are tons of shitty biological parents, obviously, who turn their kids into supporting players in a melodrama of their own imagining.

But I think this is particularly perverse for adoptive parents, who can too easily cloak a toxic mindset in a certainty of their own virtue.

Anyway, adoption is more complicated than the culture wants to admit. Read The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce and also look up the truly horrific Georgia Tann (who kidnapped children and sold them to the rich).

And stop saying "Gotcha Day."