Hi, I'm raising money to support some of my loved ones, who are in dire need of financial help after a lengthy legal battle in a court system that doesn't recognize queer, multi-parent familial relationships. Below is their story in their own words. Please chip in to support this beautiful family and community!

-HB

We are a large chosen family of queer and trans people who have had our resources stolen and our child taken away by a former family member with systemic power over us.

WHERE WE’VE BEEN

5 years ago, after many years of relationship work, community building, co-parenting and communal living, we created and signed a contract together to combine our financial resources and share equally in all assets, debts, and responsibilities of our shared life. Because legal marriage is not available to our kind of non-traditional family, this contract was meant to ensure financial security for all of us in the event of a breakup or separation in our collective. After purchasing a home together and moving in, the only cis man in our group began displaying predatory sexual behaviors, emotional abuse, and gaslighting to members of our family. We invested enormous emotional and financial resources in his mental health and in attempts to guide him toward accountability and healing. Suddenly, after years of being in process to try and shift the abusive dynamics that were emerging, he left suddenly, without warning, taking with him one of our two cars. After he took off, it became clear that he was perpetrating emotional and sexual abuse in his primary partnership with his legal spouse and she had been too beaten down and gaslit to reveal the extent of his manipulation and abuse until he was gone from the home. Soon after his abandonment, we received notice that he was taking us to court to recoup all the money he invested in our home and land. Not surprisingly, given the many privileges afforded to him by his identity as a cis, white, man of upper-middle-class background, he was the only person among us to have inherited wealth and had put far more money down on our home than any other person. He claimed throughout the entire process that he didn’t believe he had a right to this inheritance and that it was in line with his values as an anticapitalist to redistribute his wealth by investing in our queer family’s future. After moving in with our family, he ceased paid work and was completely financially supported by other members of our family who were working full-time for pay. Because of the court’s unwillingness to recognize the validity of our queer familial relationships, the financial support, childcare, and domestic labor that his other partners had provided to him for years was completely denied and had no meaning to the lawyers representing him. After a year of expensive legal negotiations, failed mediations, and total refusal on his part to meet an agreement that honored our family contract, he filed an emergency restraining order against us on behalf of our child with completely baseless accusations that the court dismissed without evidence. Accusing us of abuse, even though the courts dismissed the order, was the perfect move to set up his lawyers to succeed in his case for full custody of our child, stripping their biological mother and all their other parents of all legal rights and taking us from 50% custody to no more than 80 hours a month with our child.

There is a long and horrific history of women and queer people coming forward about abuse from men in their lives only to be accused of being hysterical and ending up having their children ripped away from them. He took advantage of this long-set precedent to attack our family out of spite.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

We’ve now spent $25,000 on lawyers and mediators only to end up losing everything, including our child. This divorce case ignored the reality of our relationships and financial commitments as a family and was extremely traumatizing. We were forced to pay this ex-member all of our savings and surrender our retirement accounts to him just to meet our FIRST payout amount of $50,000. We are now being forced to refinance our home and take cash out to pay him the remaining $95,000 over the next 18 months. We are facing the possibility of losing our home if we can’t get cash out on a new mortgage in time.

Our financial circumstances, housing security and ability to meet our needs are informed by our mixed bag of privileges and oppressions. Because of our white privilege and the ways our ancestors thrived off of owning slaves and colonizing lands, most of us have experienced a lifetime of relative security. In recognition of this, our family has a deep and rhythmic practice of paying reparations, participating in the Land Back movement, and radicalizing our concepts and actions around mutual aid. The income we generate from this GoFundMe will not be an exception, and we will be re-circulating 20% of it into BIPOC communities. The sudden loss of our sense of security through the violent actions of a white cis-man with an inheritance is a reflection of the systemic oppression we experience as a non-normative family with none of the same rights afforded to heteronormative couples. We are asking to have our sense of as well as our actual security restored by those who would recognize an organized group of queer and trans folks who love each other and tend to each other beautifully every day as being a REAL family. Our group has been coming together and gelling as a family for more than 10 years, we are devoted to our shared values of subverting the christian hegemonic white supremacist cis hetero patriarchy and clearly we are doing a good job, we are seen as a threat by the institution. We are asking for $50,000 to support recovery from this enormous violence against us, secure our housing, and continue with the good works we do in the world. We bow in gratitude to you for offering your belief and strength to us through this campaign. Thank you.