For Biff Chaplow and Trystan Reese, becoming parents was a lot like coming out. "It's a slow process — and you kind of know it's coming," Chaplow explains to POPSUGAR. "You get to a point, usually long after it happens, where you realize, 'I am a parent.'"
Reese agrees. "It's similar in that there's a lot of self-doubt," he says. "Is this the right path for us? Am I going to be happy on this path? I kept expecting people to say, 'What? You can't be parents!' And all we got was support."
While this call to parenting may sound atypical in how unpredictable it was, that's because it truly was: Chaplow and Reese — a cisgender gay man and transgender gay man, respectively — had only been dating for a year before they adopted Chaplow's sister's children to protect them from entering the foster system. Riley was 3 years old and Hailey was 1 year old at the time — they are now 10 and 7 — and once the papers were signed, Chaplow and Reese famously became "accidental gay parents."
Their story rippled across the internet by way of the popular parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time.
Their unlikely path in parenthood was just beginning, however. The duo decided to share their lives as queer parents online via their website, Biff and I, and their Instagram. In 2017, they opened a new chapter in their story when Reese became pregnant and gave birth to their son, Leo. The experience sparked a lot of questions from the general public, but Reese and Chaplow point out that their journey isn't unheard of.
"It's not a special story," Reese laughs, recalling how many transgender fathers he knows. "But we forgot, truly, how divided this country is and how many spheres of reality there are. For most people in this world, they don't live in the sphere of reality where transgender men have babies. That was a surprise that people were so blown away — so positively and so negatively."
