The Parent Trap — Real Life (original) (raw)

Image: You're cold, I'm cold too (2018) by Alexandra Noel. Courtesy the artist. In late 2020, a new online magazine started making the rounds among parents in LGBTQ+ parenting groups. Called Severance, it marketed itself as a "magazine and community for people who've been separated from biological family," which, as the editor states, may occur due to adoption, abandonment, or an NPE (non-parental event or not parent expected)-a term pertaining to misattributed parentage resulting from situations such as formal or informal adoption, kidnapping, undisclosed step-parent adoption, paternity fraud, donor-assisted conception, nonconsensual sex, and, most commonly, an extramarital affair. These, of course, are groups with profoundly different histories, demographics, life conditions, and socio-legal concerns. The fact that Severance could try to group "people who have been separated from biological