Focus on ‘the family’? How South African family policy fails queer families

Abstract

The most policy document is the White Paper on Families, which aims to facilitate the mainstreaming of a family perspective into all government policy-making from the national to the municipal level and across multiple departments. The irony is that less than a third of South African families actually conform to the two cisgender heterosexual biological parent model that is favoured in family policy. South African research has shown that children of lesbian parents learn open-mindedness and to be comfortable with the family in which they live, and that men in same-sex relationships challenge gendered divisions of household tasks. Promoting the two-biological-parent family as the preferred family structure creates an impossible ideal for the majority of South Africans to live up to. Because such a family structure is strongly connected to class, it is out of reach for the majority of citizens, let alone those who live in queer relationships.