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[–]worried19 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Not necessarily true. If a birth parent finds out an adoptive parent committed fraud during the adoption process, most states will step in.

Really, even 5 or 10 years later? I don't know what a judge would do if trans status were withheld from biological parents, but I sure wouldn't want u/peakingatthemoment or anyone else to take the chance of it causing a huge problem down the road.

The concern here is not with homosexuality or even transsexuality, it's with honesty and transparency.

I agree, even though I don't really consider a male-to-female transsexual to be a gay man. I mean, I know technically peaking is a homosexual male (and she would agree), but it would be hard to think of her a gay man, given the lengths she's gone to to transition, including sex reassignment surgery. I don't think most potential birth mothers would think of her as a gay man either, but they still need to weigh how they feel about transsexuality and whether it would impact their decision to place their child for adoption with a particular couple.

[–]MarkTwainiac 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I said "most states will step in," not that a judge or panel of judges would necessarily overturn the adoption.

But my hunch is, if either the biological mother or father went to court and said we were not told this important information and therefore adoption fraud occurred, the state would have to take it seriously and go through all the procedures stipulated by law. The state might very well require new investigations into the home life of the adoptive couple, the child's mental and physical wellbeing, and psychological assessments of the adoptive parents.

What to do about the child would probably be left largely for the bio parents to decide, though the state agencies involved would weigh in. If the child was doing well and seemed happy and all seemed OK in the adoptive home, I can't imagine anyone involved would argue the child should be removed from the home. But I imagine that at the very least the adoptive parents would get slapped on the wrist or sanctioned, perhaps fined.

States are very nosy and aggressive in this sort of situation. A state would want to set a legal precedent to make it very clear to future adoptive parents that in the adoption process, neither the bio parents nor the adoptive ones can commit fraud. It would be a test case.

My point is, OP tread carefully here. Please you and your husband take care not do anything that could jeopardize your position or to open yourselves up to charges of deception, fraud and bad faith.

BTW, there were a number of prominent US cases in the 1980s and 1990s where adoptions were overturned - not after 5 or 10 years - but when the kid was 3 or 4. And there was the famous case of Elian Gonzalez, who was returned to his father in Cuba when he was 7, I think that was his age.

There was also a famous case where the wife of a man in New Jersey took their young son to Brazil, her home country, for a visit when he was quite little, and she never returned. She stayed in Brazil and divorced her American husband, then married a Brazilian bigwig from a very rich powerful family there. The Brazilian courts allowed the new husband to adopt the child, even though his father in the US was trying to get the child back. Then the mother suddenly died. The Brazilian courts kept ruling in favor of the Brazilian man, saying he was the legal father and the boy's actual father, the American guy, had no standing. The boy's name was changed, he learnt Portuguese, went to a posh Brazilian school and thrived as he grew up... In the end, the boy was finally returned to his father in the US when he was 12-13. It was a heartbreaking case. I don't know how it turned out. I imagine the boy is in his 20s now.

There also was a famous case in the 1990s where two women at the same IVF clinic thought they'd each been implanted with embryos made from their own eggs and their husbands' sperm. When a couple of years later one of the kids was found to have a recessive genetic condition that his parents had already been tested for and knew they didn't carry, the clinic had to do an investigation to find out what happened. Turns out, the two women's embryos had gotten switched in the lab. After all the legal wrangling and court proceedings, the state gave custody of the two boys to their biological parents, and the two fathers in the case just wanted to swap the kids like trading cards. The women - each of whom had gestated, birthed, breastfed, and raised each other's biological son - couldn't do it. They became friends and decided the best option was to keep the kids with the parents they were already with but to buy houses next door to each other and to raise the two boys side by side with the involvement of all four parents and so the boys would have daily contact with both mothers. I dunno how it turned out in the long run, but it was a good Lifetime movie with Melissa Gilbert.