Genetic Supremacy

In October 2021 Real Life, an online magazine about “living with technology,” published “The Parent Trap: How DNA Testing Complicates the Queer Family,” which begins by noting the appearance, within LGBTQ+ parenting groups, of Severance Magazine. Severance calls itself “a magazine and community for people who’ve been separated from their biological family,” a broad category that includes those who have been adopted, fostered, trafficked, conceived through reproductive technologies like surrogacy and gamete donation, and born through misattributed paternity. There is great diversity of experience both within the broad category of the biologically (or genealogically) severed, and within each of those subcategories. Nevertheless, Severance is devoted to the idea that within this diversity there is sufficient commonality of shared experience to warrant creating a safe and inclusive space for reflection, discussion, community building, and advocacy.

Alexandra Kimball and Tamara Lea Spira, authors of “The Parent Trap,” will have none of it:

The fact that Severance could try to group “people who have been separated from biological family” all together, as if the experience of being raised apart from a genetic relative trumped all the other circumstances, speaks to the rising power of genetic discourse in our culture and the idea that the “genetic family,” measured by DNA, is the norm against which all forms of family should be judged. 

Severance’s mission statement, in fact, nowhere commits itself to the proposition that biological severance “trump[s] all the other circumstances,” nor does it employ the phrase “genetic family,” allegedly “the norm against which all forms of family should be judged.” Indeed, Kimball and Spira’s enclosure of “genetic family” in quotation marks disingenuously implies that Severance does use this phrase.

Having attributed the idea of the “genetic family” to Severance’s mission, and having further attributed normative supremacy to that idea, Kimball and Spira launch a fusillade of guilt-by-association attacks that work by inflating their target balloon into something enormous and monstrous:

If there’s any ideology that is at great friction with the queer critique of the compulsory normative family, it’s bionormativity: the claim that biology prescribes identities, hierarchizes relationships, and holds pre-ordained truths. 

This very bionormativity is at the root of so many new forms of sociopolitical oppression:

This shift can be seen as part of a broader “biogenetic turn” in society that places genetics at the center of multiple identities and truths: selfhood, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, health, and family. It manifests in an array of new social and political practices — everything from the genetic surveillance of migrants and criminalized persons, to DNA-based target marketing algorithms, to the revival of a (newly geneticized) scientific racism, to a pop culture obsession with genetic origins. … Particularly troubling is the scientific reassertion of “biological” sex and gender, found in the ever elusive (and illusive) search for gay and trans genes.

At the core of the concept of the “genetic family” is a deterministic metaphysical construction of the self alleged to be pervasive and deeply rooted in Western thought:

To understand the “genetic family,” we must first understand the “genetic self” — the idea that, as science historian Nathan Comfort puts it, “your genes are your essential, true identity,” not just the source of “truth” about yourself but also a predictor of your future. Such ideas about the self as singular, static over time, and unique have been pervasive in the West since pre-Enlightenment religious thinkers conceptualized the “soul,” god-given and separable from one’s inherited qualities. But as religion gave way to Enlightenment thinking, the “real” self took root in the body as something that is heritable, discoverable, and even measurable.

This deterministic concept of the self now assumes a biochemical identity, according to which one’s chromosomal makeup is, in Kimball and Spira’s words, one’s “defining source.”

To show how grossly inflated Kimball and Spira’s attributions are, I will quote a passage from Severance that they discuss, in which a donor-conceived person writes about what the loss of biological mirroring is like:

And why are you so assertive and reckless and obstinate? Certainly not from Mom’s side of the family. The closest comparison I can make is to phantom limb syndrome. You feel this burning pain where one of your legs used to be (though I suppose I was never born with that leg) and the only way to quench the pain is to hold up a mirror to your other leg to trick your mind into believing you have full function of both limbs. […] But when you find your father, it’s like you’re finally fitted with a prosthetic and you’ve been given a chance at approaching a normal life.1

Here is what Kimball and Spira take this passage to illustrate:

It is a short skip from the idea that DNA encodes our “true selves” to the idea that there is such a thing as a “genetic family.” If “who you are” is a product of genetics, and genetics are “passed down” through reproduction, communing with one’s biological relations is not only a matter of connecting with one’s progenitors but of returning one’s self to its defining source. This translates directly into gamete donor discourses.

How a set of reflections on the experience of biological mirroring losses, and their restoration, is supposed to depend upon an inflated concept of the all-determining power of genes, is beyond my ability to understand.

But “The Parent Trap” enacts this two-step over and over again:

Step 1: Ascribe an extreme theory of the tyrannical normativity of DNA to your opponent.

Step 2: Slander your opponent by implying that various morally outrageous ideas, practices, and policies also embrace that theory.

The slanders are endless. Kimball and Spira tell us that the readers of and contributors to Severance, by allegedly espousing genetic supremacy, are fellow travelers with scientific racism; trans-exclusionary doctrines of gender as biologically determined; and right-wing, colonial, and heterosexist patriarchal notions of the nuclear family.

Kimball and Spira use the language of guilt by association (my boldface):

The emphasis on genetic selfhood and family aligns with a deeper conservatism that puts it at odds with existing queer theories of selfhood and family.

The central claim … that donor conception that separates children from genetic family members is a rights violation as well as psychologically harmful … readily aligns with longstanding “traditional family” positions from the patriarchal right.

The idea of a “genetic family,” itself rooted in a colonial and heterosexist concept of kinship, is easily assimilated to the edict that children belong with their (cis-gendered, white) married mother and father.

Genetics often serves a larger agenda, in this case, the social and political supremacy of the white, settler, heterosexual nuclear family.

“The Parent Trap” is a relentlessly energetic exercise in strawmanning (step 1 of the two-step) and guilt by association (step 2). The strawmanning is so extreme that its targets would scarcely recognize themselves in it, as when Kimball and Spira write that opponents of anonymous gamete donation espouse a “remedy” that would be “to reform the family by reinstating the absent genetic family members.” Naturally, they fail to cite any actual critic or activist here. The idea of “reinstating absent genetic family members” is nonsensical on its face.

Do the readers of and contributors to Severance—those of us who have experienced genealogical severance and find something to criticize in it—perforce espouse heteronormative genetic determinist ideas of the self and of family? Have queer people who have experienced severance, and who critically interrogate that experience, internalized heteronormative and biologically determinist dogmas?

My countersuggestion is that the very hierarchical and compulsory normativity of which we are accused is itself implicit in the attacks on our efforts to cope with our severance.

Contrary to the impression Kimball and Spira convey, those of us who seek to identify our genealogical parents are not ipso facto seeking to repudiate or reject or displace the parents who raised us. (Although we might, but for readily intelligible reasons, arising from the abuse or neglect many of us have suffered at our parents’ hands, often in the form of devaluing us precisely because we are genealogically unrelated.) The truth is that for many of us, our life stories began before severance. I believe there is a growing public awareness that our desire to have our stories back is in no way pathological.

Nor is it defensible to claim, against those of us whose stories begin with severance, such as people conceived through anonymous gamete donation, that to call the gamete donor a “parent” is to adopt a genetic supremacist conception of the family.2 Otherwise, anyone who refers to what “runs in the family,” or refers to “family health history” is presupposing a genetic supremacist conception of the family. Kimball and Spira can enclose phrases like “genetic bewilderment” [sic]3 and “genetic mirrors” in skeptical scare quotes, or they could listen open-mindedly to people like myself, who was entirely unprepared for the power of seeing a photo of my birth mother for the first time, or of subsequently meeting her and her family and observing the uncanny rhyming affinities we share. What does any of this have to do with a putative fetishization of the chromosome?

I speak of genealogical, not genetic, family precisely to highlight the personal and temporal nature of the relations I bear to my progenitors, not the abstract and impersonal idea of a gene that Kimball and Spira allege we are enthralled by. They write:

In the age of the genetic family, the broader collective vision in which kinship is measured by the quality of relationships, by the labor and love invested in them, is subordinated to the impersonal and hierarchical idea of a “genetic link.”

However, in an ironic twist, the dichotomy they allege between the “broader collective vision” of kinship as measured by the “quality of relationships,” versus “the impersonal and hierarchical” conception of the “genetic family,” is itself deeply hierarchical. This is because, in their view, the only relationships whose “quality” determines kinship are those that imitate the traditional normative model of the nuclear family, implemented and enforced by severance, while the relationships from which we have been severed count for nothing.

So the question becomes: who is wresting the idea of family away from whom? “The Parent Trap” claims that the conception of the genetic family aims to undermine the LGBTQ+ conception of family as collective and rooted in nurturing relationships. I claim, to the contrary, that to dichotomize the ideas of kinship in this way, and to pathologize the idea that there is value in biological (i.e., genealogical) relationships, is to devalue all aspects of a severed person’s life and relationships that cannot fit into a traditional nuclear model of the family.

“The Parent Trap” is subtitled “How DNA testing complicates the queer family.” But DNA isn’t the point. For the severed, DNA testing has only ever been a tool for recovering our genealogies. A more honest phrasing would be “How genealogical knowledge complicates the queer family.” More honest, but also absurd. How could someone’s possessing genealogical knowledge possibly threaten the integrity of the queer family to which they belong? The answer lies in the conception of family “The Parent Trap” presupposes, one governed not by the slogan “love makes a family,” with all its liberatory potential, but rather by a reduplication of the very hierarchical model of “the compulsory normative family,”4 with its exclusionary interpretation of kinship relations, that is asserted to be the problem. How rich to claim to defend the right of queer people to construct families, and to construct freer meanings of “family,” while roundly rejecting the right of the severed to do the same.