“Rainbow Families”: Rethinking the Ties That Bind Us

The rise of the far right in Europe has been accompanied by a narrative promoting a return to the traditional family unit. While this concept has never been universal, it now seems more outdated than ever. Can looking to LGBTQIA+ people, who have always had to forge their own path, help rethink our relationship with family, parenthood, and care?

Ilaria and Elisabetta form a happy couple. They live with their 19-month-old daughter, Lea, in the socially liberal city of Bologna in Italy.

However, their path to becoming same-sex parents hasn’t been easy. Lea was conceived through IVF, for which, because of Italy’s prohibition on the procedure for same-sex couples, they were forced to travel to Barcelona, thereby incurring logistical and financial strain. Ilaria and Elisabetta also struggled to obtain the ovarian stimulation medication necessary for a good IVF outcome. The medication itself isn’t illegal in Italy, but, as Ilaria puts it, “some people are simply opposed to it, and they can shatter people’s dreams”.

“A couple of pharmacies actually refused to give us the necessary drugs, and our family doctor refused to help us too. We managed only because we had a friend who owns a pharmacy.”

In recent years, the rise of the far right in Europe has been accompanied by a backlash against the advancement of LGBTQIA+ rights and the promotion of a return to “traditional family values”. This conservative discourse is characterised by an emphasis on fertility and productivity, a distrust of non-traditional family structures, and a desire to control bodies, particularly those of women, all fuelled by a global decline in birth rates and an ageing population.

Since far-right Giorgia Meloni’s rise to power in 2023, Italy has taken several steps to roll back freedoms, such as criminalising surrogacy abroad and restricting LGBTQIA+ topics in schools. The country currently ranks 35 out of 49 on ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map, which measures countries based on their legal and policy practices for LGBTQIA+ people. Family rights are one of the areas in which Italy lags behind the most.

However, Italy is not an anomaly within the European Union. Equal marriage is recognised in only 16 member states, joint adoption in 17, and assisted reproduction for non-heterosexual couples in 13.

“Another problem arose when our daughter was born,” Ilaria recounts. “For the first year, she was formally only Elisabetta’s daughter, since Elisabetta gave birth to her and I had no legal way to recognise her as my child.”

The situation was finally resolved when the Constitutional Court overturned restrictions introduced by the government in 2023. It ruled that non-biological mothers in same-sex couples are entitled to automatic legal recognition if the child was conceived abroad. In July 2025, 11 months after her daughter was born, Ilaria was finally able to legally recognise her as her own. “We are still in the process of adding my surname to her last name.”

In recent years, the family rights of LGBTQIA+ people have received growing recognition from supranational bodies. In 2023, the European Parliament voted in favour of recognising parenthood across the EU “irrespective of how a child was conceived, born or the type of family they have.”

However, the difficulties persist. In its Strategy for LGBTIQ+ Equality 2026-2030, adopted in October 2025, the European Commission notes that “due to differences in family law between Member States, family ties may no longer be recognised in cross-border situations.”

According to the FRA’s third LGBTIQ survey, “14% of respondents in LGBTIQ-parented families faced problems in having their parenthood legally recognised.”

Queerness and happiness

The norm of a nuclear family made up of a mother, a father, and their children does not reflect even the reality of many heterosexual cisgender adults – think of single-parent families (which, according to Eurostat data, account for 14 per cent of households with children), or children raised in foster homes. But while these types of “non-traditional” family arrangements have been largely normalised, queer people and “rainbow families” continue to face the deep-rooted misconception that their relationships are inherently dysfunctional and therefore unsuited to building a family.

This is particularly the case for transgender people, who are also most often overlooked in family law. Of the 49 countries covered by ILGA-Europe’s analysis, only eight – Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Malta, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden – recognise trans parenthood.

Yet for many LGBTQIA+ individuals, family is a lifeline. Chloé, a 41-year-old transgender woman from Belgium, is a prime example. Having begun her gender transition five years ago, she recalls receiving generally positive reactions from everyone, including her family, her then partner, and her three daughters, who are aged between five and eight.

“I had to explain [to my eldest], in a few simple words, why her dad had become a mum,” she recalls. In this transformed family, Chloé did not wish to “take the place of either dad or mum,” and had to carve out a new role tailored to her. From family conversations, a term emerged: “Mawé” – “a sort of poetic contraction of Mum-Chloé,” she smiles. “Mawé”, she says, is a unique name to describe “a role I can invent”.

Chloé and her ex-wife have now divorced and share custody of their three daughters. But her coming out had a positive impact on her family life. “In fact, my transition probably allowed our relationship to last a little longer,” she says, with common ground opening up between her and her then wife, who has been her support and confidante from the very beginning. Embracing her gender identity has enabled Chloé to “[become] a better version of myself,” something that has been beneficial for her relationships, her daughters, and her family ties.

With an increasing focus on alternative family arrangements comes recognition that heterosexual family structures can be a place of violence and oppression rather than love.

Ilaria, in spite of the difficulties of becoming a parent in Italy due to the hostile legal framework, has also found happiness in motherhood. She and Elisabetta share responsibilities equally and the support of family and friends has made everything easier. “I felt like a parent every step of the way. I feel like a mother in my own right.”

According to sociologist Gabrielle Richard, author of the essay “Faire famille autrement” (“Doing family differently”), drawing on queer experiences can help societies rethink family structure. Faced with the view that their sexual orientation or gender identity is incompatible with building a family, many queer people are characterised by what Richard calls the “lateral thinking of parenthood,” whereby parents “often do not see parenthood as just another milestone to reach … but rather as an opportunity, a desire, a privilege.”

Richard told me in an interview that nothing is predetermined when it comes to relationships and parenthood for queer people, whose lives are often deemed undesirable, and are therefore not “provided for” socially or legally.

“Without ignoring the violence inherent in this state of affairs, we must recognise that it simultaneously grants them a unique freedom of action in these areas.”

The impossible family

With an increasing focus on alternative family arrangements comes recognition that heterosexual family structures can be a place of violence and oppression rather than love.

In her essay “Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communising of Care” (Pluto Press, 2023), American teacher and author M. E. O’Brien critiques the bourgeois ideal of the family in the west – typically white, heterosexual, property-owning, stable, and Puritanical. While families may represent a place of love and unconditional care, O’Brien argues that they can also become primary agents of inequality, normativity and violence.

In her view, the conception of the family that emerged from the Industrial Revolution is now reaching its limits. “The family of the present is impossible,” she concludes. “It is torn between the violence and precarity of racial capitalism, the excessive demands of daily labor, and collective yearnings for freedom.”

This matches Chloé’s experience: it was the pressure and expectations linked to raising a family – not her coming out – that strained the relationship with her ex-wife. “If I sacrifice myself for my daughters, I’ve got no energy left for them afterwards.”

For O’Brien, chronic unemployment, austerity policies, stagnant wages, and the difficulty of accessing private property – an essential part of the myth of family stability – are making more and more people question the importance of the traditional family unit. “Many already experience the family as a trap of hopelessness: homeless queer youth, people fleeing abusive partners, others stuck in dissatisfying and lifeless relationships, or millions of the people choosing to live alone.” A precariousness set to increase with the ongoing economic, political, ecological and social crises. “The family, as a norm, as an institution, as an aspiration, has already catastrophically failed numerous people.”

O’Brien acknowledges that some of the same issues can affect LGBTQIA+ families, too. “Chosen families [the name given to non-biological kinship bonds, and especially LGBTQIA+ families], too, encounter significant limits. They can quickly run into many of the oppressive logics of the family.”

“Other critics, including Sophie Lewis and Ariel Ajeno, have pointed to the exclusive character of the chosen family”, O’Brien tells me. “Conventional families have the pretence of unconditionality – you are welcome because you are family: no one has to choose you. But needing to be chosen requires the active sympathy of others. This allows for considerable coercion, evaluation, and status competition.”

Pro-birth contradictions

As several critics, including O’Brien, have pointed out, the modern conception of the family unit is still, at least in part, beholden to notions of productivity and growth. At a time of geopolitical competition and declining birth rates, these norms tend to take on military overtones – for example, in 2024, France’s president Emmanuel Macron announced a major plan to tackle infertility in order to enable “demographic rearmament”. The French government’s pro-birth ambitions sparked controversy again in 2026 when it sent a letter to all French citizens aged 29 to raise awareness of infertility and boost the birth rate.

Contrary to what Macron’s rhetoric may suggest, France’s fertility rate has remained higher than that of most other EU countries.

France offers greater protection for the family rights of LGBTIQ individuals than other European countries, according to ILGA-Europe. It recognises marriage, joint adoption and medically assisted insemination. However, ILGA-Europe highlights several issues that remain: the failure to recognise registered partnerships as equivalent to marriage, the lack of automatic recognition of parenthood, and the recognition of parents.

“Advocating for pro-birth policies starts with recognising the existence and rights of families that already exist,” says Richard. She sees Macron’s rhetoric as a “real middle finger” to non-heterosexual families that are “confined to the margins of the system.”

“Restricting demographic incentives to certain types of family demonstrates a wilful blindness to the realities of those families that do not conform to the norm,” she says, “and suggests that what is at stake is not so much the preservation of the family and the population, but rather an increase in the number of good white, traditionally Catholic and heterosexual families.”

Contrary to what Macron’s rhetoric may suggest, France’s fertility rate has remained higher than that of most other EU countries: it stood at 1.61 live births per woman in 2024, below the replacement level of 2.01 but well above the EU average of 1.34.

Meanwhile, Italy’s birth rate has remained consistently below the EU average (1.18 children per woman as of 2024). In an attempt to counter demographic decline, Meloni’s government has pledged more funds to support families, and encouraged the arrival of foreign workers. At the same time, the government still fails to grant LGBTQIA+ families equal rights, and continues its rhetorical crusade against immigration.

In Hungary, too, former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán made demographic revival one of his main objectives. While economic necessity was one of the main arguments, the ideology of ethnic preservation was also important. The far-right populist portrayed immigrants, especially Muslims, as a threat to the Hungarian nation.

Reshaping our ties

In her essay, O’Brien details the survival strategies adopted by marginalised communities, such as colonised, enslaved and queer people, in the face of oppressive power and discrimination. Calling for nuance, she does not advocate a total individualisation of society, nor a complete replacement of the individual family with a socialist, state-sponsored “universal family”, nor the disappearance of spaces for care and affection. “Instead of destroying the family, we must abolish it by preserving what is crucial to it – human love, connection, care, community, romance – without binding these qualities to the particular form of the household within capitalism.”

For O’Brien, “Abolition means radically transforming these qualities, freeing them from relationships of coercion, abuse, isolation, and property … to abolish the family means to free our capacity to care for each other.”

“I don’t think the concept of family is outdated,” says Ilaria. “I think the concept of the traditional, patriarchal family is outdated. I think that today, when starting a family is increasingly difficult for economic, professional and social reasons, building extended families is more necessary than ever. What’s more, the ‘traditional family’ is clearly a political construct – because families have always extended to the broader community, throughout all of human history.

“Extended family, to me, means many things, but above all, it means relying on friends and strong personal bonds to create a chosen family. We see it every day: we build new traditions and new foundations together.”

For Richard, broadening our conceptions of the family could help alleviate the pressure on heterosexual couples, who often struggle with the social expectations to start a family at any cost. This pressure may also force adults into undesirable or unfulfillable roles – a situation that lies at the root of much domestic violence.

“We need to rethink parenthood,” says Richard, “not as a right, not as an obligation, but as a possibility, as a responsibility.”