Prof. Mona Motakef: Sexual orientation and gender identity are still key causes of social inequality and go hand in hand with unequal opportunities and life chances. LGBTQ+ people have long been denied the ability to start families at all. The first hurdle is therefore being able to imagine themselves as parents. Only then can they think about which options are open to them and which ones they want to take advantage of. After all, who can, wants to, should or may become parents depends on legal, medical, biological and personal factors - it is often very complicated and expensive, especially with reproductive medicine. Even after starting a family, many experience legal, institutional and everyday inequalities. Examples include the obligation to adopt stepchildren for lesbian couples or the lack of rights for social parents in multi-parent families. Trans* parenthood was even made legally impossible in the old Transsexuals Act. It is still not clearly regulated today - a trans* mother remains registered as the father on her child's birth certificate. In everyday life, this means that families have to constantly prove that they are "real" families.

You can read the full interview on the TU Dortmund University website