Homosexual Reproduction

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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"I am Kronar, Son of Man. For a hundred generations, my fathers have kept the bloodline pure. Free from Woman's taint."
—Oglaf, Son of Kronar, Oglaf

It's not unusual to see a same-sex couple with a child. This arrangement can happen in many ways: children informally looked after by two same-sex platonic friends, adopted children looked after by their parent's same-sex roommate, adopted kids of an actual same-sex couple, natural children of one (usually divorced) partner who view the other same-sex partner as a parent, etc...

But what about the child who is born to two genetic parents of the same sex?

For simplicity's sake, this trope turns a blind eye to the exact method of birth (People Jars, womb, etc.) and sticks to naming any kid who draws their genetic heritage from two individuals of the same sex, regardless of how they were incubated/born, and whether this was the result of magic, shapeshifting, DNA splicing, or Bizarre Alien Biology.

Theoretically it should be possible even for two cisgender women to have a biological child by a process called haploidization, or through creating sperm cells from one of the two mother's bone marrow. This would theoretically mean that all of their children would be female due to the lack of a Y chromosome.

For males, there is research being conducted on the creation of male eggs, which consists of removing the nucleus of an ovum and replacing it with the nucleus of a sperm. This new egg would then be fertilized by sperm from the other father. The process has been documented in mice and its viability in human reproduction is still being developed.

Related to Has Two Mommies. Compare Truly Single Parent. Contrast Face Full of Alien Wingwong. Can result in Mister Seahorse. Often a necessity in a One-Gender Race. Not to be confused with Your Tomcat Is Pregnant.

Examples of Homosexual Reproduction include:

Anime and Manga

  • Fletch and Arata have a daughter with a little help from "ground breaking science" near the end of Iono the Fanatics.
  • Vandread is full of this. Ezra, one of the female side characters, was pregnant with the child of Rebecca, another female crew member, via technological gene-mixing. In fact, this is how all women from Megele reproduce. The men on the other hand, use a less personal but otherwise similar factory setup.
  • Blame - Cibo and Sana-Kan have a "child" at the end of the series.
  • The Arume reproduce this way in Blue Drop. For an extra kick, they can also mate with human women. To be fair, they do use cloning/genetic engineering technology to accomplish this.
  • Arguably occurred in Neon Genesis Evangelion with Rei, who was made up of a combination of Yui Ikari and Lilith's DNA. It's debatable whether Angels, including Lilith, have a physical sex, though.
    • Considering what the Sixteenth Angel was apparently trying to do with Rei, and the various ways some of the others...interact with other organic objects, including the Evas, I'll say it's definitely not due to a lack of trying.
  • Reinforce Zwei of the Lyrical Nanoha franchise was born in this manner due to the unusual circumstances behind her creation. As revealed in the third Sound Stage of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Reinforce Zwei was made from the Linker Core of Hayate. However, Hayate's Linker Core had permanently melded with Reinforce Eins' Linker Core by then, leading to a child with traits of them both, including a few leftover memories and emotions of the two. This, among others, allowed Reinforce Eins to leave a Video Will for Reinforce Zwei to view in her dreams, even though she has been dead for ten years.
    • Events of StrikerS, first four Numbers have Jail's DNA, with Uno being a feminized clone suggest that their society has the tech to do this for ordinary people, though it may not be commercialized yet.
  • Crest of the Stars definitely has the tech to do this, though we haven't seen any characters with odd parentage.
  • This trope makes up a large part of the plot of the Sex Pistols manga.
  • Hilariously defied in Nagasarete Airantou. Mikoto wants to have a kid as a present for her mother's birthday, and her choice of partner is Rin. Rin's answer?

That's impossible between girls, you fool!

  • A patient in Franken Fran was infected with a protozoan with her (female) best friend's DNA. Fran managed to use that DNA as the 'sperm' to the patient's egg to create a child.
  • Kano from Texhnolyze is stated to have three mothers, though the exact mechanics are left unexplained. He did also have a father or several, who were also sons of these mothers. The Class is obsessed with selective inbreeding and genetic engineering to defeat the perceived defects that caused them to be imprisoned underground in the first place, but they get all the physical and mental deformities associated with incest along the way.


Comic Books

  • According to Chris Claremont, this was the original plan for Nightcrawler of the X-Men. Mystique and Destiny were supposed to be his birth parents, with Mystique morphing into a man for it to happen. However, it received an Executive Veto since it was deemed too controversial. Instead, his father is revealed to be the Marvel equivalent of Satan, which is so much less controversial. More than one subsequent writer and a decent number of fans have since considered Retconning this into his actual backstory.
  • Superboy (Conner Kent, or Kon-El) is the result of mixing Superman's DNA with Lex Luthor's. His only daddy was originally Cadmus director Paul Westfield but that didn't have nearly enough sexual tension.
  • In Alan Moore's Tomorrow Stories, it's revealed that the heroine Cobweb and her sidekick/lover Clarice are the daughters of a previous Cobweb and Clarice, having been born as a result of a ritual where their ancestors made love in a certain place which had certain special qualities. This was because their ancestors were, due to an accident, from a One-Gender Race.


Fan Works

Film

  • In Being John Malkovich, Cameron Diaz gets Catherine Keener pregnant. Well, technically John Malkovitch gets Catherine Keener pregnant while Cameron Diaz is metaphysically inside his body, but they seem to count it as Cameron Diaz's kid.
  • The closest thing to a realistic example happens in The Broken Hearts Club. Patrick's lesbian sister Annie asks him to be her partner Leslie's sperm donor; this way the baby would be related to both moms.


Live Action TV

  • In the space episode of News Radio, after Space Matthew accidentally unplugs the life support for the whole station, he and Space Bill McNeil decide they'll need some petri dishes to further the human race.
  • In the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors, Jon Stewart provided this semi-joking theory regarding honoree Bruce Springsteen:

Jon Stewart: I believe that Bob Dylan and James Brown had a baby.


Literature

  • In the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, easily reversible sex-change technology exists. In Excession, one major plot point revolves around the common lovers' practice of simultaneous pregnancies: after one half of the couple gets pregnant, they both change genders (which stalls but doesn't abort the pregnancy), the other person gets pregnant, and then the now-male one becomes female again.
  • Hell, there's a character in The Dark Tower, Mordred Deschain, with two mothers and two fathers...
  • Kind of a Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke, but in the Hand of Thrawn duology, it turns out that Major Grodin Tierce is actually a clone of a Red Guard, with a bit of Thrawn's mind added in.
    • For that matter, Joruus C'baoth could be considered to be the child of the original C'baoth and Palpatine, - we don't know much about his origins, sure, but while he looks like and thinks he's C'baoth, there's certainly an Emperor-ish cast to his thoughts and use of Force Lightning. That would make Luuke, who is a clone of Luke but is an extension of C'baoth, another one of these.
  • In Walter Jon Williams's novel Aristoi, the (male) protagonist's boyfriend voluntarily becomes pregnant with the protagonist's sperm, using the commonplace technology of the far future. (It's so far in the future that people have godlike powers and can do just about anything.)
  • Nicolae Carpathia of the Left Behind novels is revealed in the prequel The Rising to be the son of two gay men, incubated in one of their wives. You know, because homosexuals are evil. Subtle as a sledgehammer.
  • One of the corporate mercenaries working with Turner at the beginning of Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer) mentions that she has a child with her female partner using a "gene splice". Nothing else is mentioned of the process aside from its expense.
  • The bizarre lesbian sci-fi book Daughters of a Coral Dawn has its protagonists accomplish this via a drug called Estrova (although it is implied that they also had kids by more natural means). How this is done is never quite clarified, although it seems to involve fertilizing one motile ovum with one sessile one. It's necessary, because they've all left Earth and need to breed to make sure their colony survives. Two books later, it turns out that their granddaughters have mutated into a new humanoid being that produces Estrova naturally.
  • In Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos (part of the Vorkosigan Saga) we get Athos, an all male colony. The plot kicks off because there are problems with the (repeatedly cloned) ova they have to import to allow the males to reproduce.


Mythology

  • Sleipnir from Norse Mythology has two fathers—Svaðilfari (described as "the best of all horses") and Loki, though technically speaking Loki was female throughout the entire relationship.
  • In the Welsh Mabinogion, the demi-god brothers Gilfaethwy and Gwydion anger their sorcerer uncle Math, who transforms them into matched sets of animals: a stag and a doe, a boar and a sow, and a wolf and a she-wolf. The brothers mate in their animal forms and produce offspring: Hyddwn (fawn), Hychddwn (piglet), and Bleiddwn (wolf pup). After three years Math transforms his nephews and their children into humans. Must've been an interesting family.
  • Gilgamesh was described as two-thirds god, and in some versions has three parents, a mortal man, a god and a goddess.


Tabletop Games

  • Vampire: The Requiem has a supplement known as Wicked Dead that talks about dampyr, creatures born from the unnatural desire of vampires to have children. One method of creating dampyr is the use of a dark ritual, some versions of which allow a male vampire to impregnate a male human or a female vampire to impregnate a female human.
  • The small-press RPG Fates Worse Than Death takes place in a rundown cyberpunk future where, among other things, homosexuality is perfectly normal. One of the sourcebooks makes mention of artificial wombs that allow male couples to reproduce and a finger tool that converts epithelials into sperm cells for lesbian couples.
  • One of the advanced Craft Abilities in Exalted is Craft (Genesis), the setting's equivalent of genetic engineering. This trope is really the least of what advanced Genesis-tech can do.
  • In the King's Blood card game, playing the titular card allows a character to produce heirs with anyone, regardless of suit or gender. For some reason, pairing males seems to be especially popular.
  • A god with sufficient Knacks in Scion can be whichever gender he or she pleases in the World, allowing a goddess to impregnate a woman or a god to become pregnant. One sample character, Annie X, is the result of Kali taking on her mother's husband's form.


Video Games

  • Probably doesn't count because it can only be done with the help of cheating devices, but it's possible to send two female Pokémon to the Daycare and get an egg.
    • Two males doesn't work though, presumably because the child inherits the species of the mother.
  • The asari from Mass Effect look female but are actually a One-Gender Race, and they can conceive a child by a partner of either gender from any other species. Liara is a child of two asari, as is Morinth in the second game. That last one, however, has her own problems...
    • This is possible for all species, or at very least humans through genetic engineering. Designer babies are common amongst the rich; in Mass Effect 2 you meet a character that was created using only a single person's DNA (albeit with a lot of genes borrowed from elsewhere). If you can do it with one person, you can do it with two.
  • In Hitman: Codename 47, Agent 47 is the result of a cloning experiment that combined the DNA of five of the world's deadliest criminals - all men - in an effort to create a "perfect human".
  • Wizardry 8 offers the chance to sleep with a demon goddess (actually necessary unless the player knew about a certain plot event ahead of time and set things up to work around it), and the character who did it will find their pissed-off demonic daughter near the end of the game. Go into that scene with an all-female party, and a woman will sleep with the demoness. The daughter shows up regardless.
  • In Harvest Moon DS Cute, it's possible to choose one of the four special not-exactly-human girls as a "best friend" in place of a husband. Should you go their route, the Harvest Lord will show up at some point and magic up a kid for you and your "friend".
    • Only in the Japanese version, though, since Natsume had to appease Moral Guardians who wouldn't acknowledge this game exists if it broke into their house at night and ate their children alive.
    • Damn Moral Guardians!
  • The Sims 2 has a cheat that allows you to impregnate your sims with anyone you want, so same-sex genetic parents are possible. Numerous mods have been created for Sims 3 that allow same sex couples to get pregnant through standard WooHoo.
    • There's also at least one such mod for Sims 2.
  • In Fate/stay night Saber aka King Arthur has a child with Guinevere. Saber did say she was never treated as a woman, but that doesn't change the fact that she is a woman. Merlin did some very strange magic for the occasion.


Webcomics

  • In Girly, the main character's love interest has two moms, and we're told outright that she's their biological child (the explanation is given a humorous Hand Wave).
    • and then in the end it turns out that the two main characters have a daughter!
  • The Touhou fancomic Touhou Nekokayou features Original Character Carroll Kirisame, born after magically combining the DNA of Marisa Kirisame and Alice Margatroid. She refers to Marisa as her father (though she uses feminine terms and pronouns to refer to her in every other respect). The exact process Marisa and Alice used remains a Noodle Incident.
  • The Japanese fan-art site Pixiv had an art challenge along these lines: "Let's Make Touhou Kids!". The results are available for review here (might be NSFW), including a few artists' comic series starring their new creations. Notably, the artist Kyouno has a series, Touhou Boys and Girls, with (at last count) six children of female-female couples—and, as the title suggests, two of the kids are male.
  • An Oglaf comic Son of Kronar (NSFW) says his family has kept their bloodline pure of woman's taint for a hundred generations. And depicts one of the aforementioned, er, ass-babies.
    • Fridge Brilliance when you consider that males have XY chromosome, and it is possible that the chromosomes combine into XX (female). On the other hand, if female homosexual reproduction were to produce male offspring...
  • In Umlaut House 2 Rhonda is the daughter of two men, she even jokes that she "is of no woman born". Towards the end of the first series it was stated that there are biotech companies that help homosexual couples reproduce (though one of Rhonda's dads is a Mad Scientist).
  • In Drowtales, it turns out that the Jaal'darya use their "manatech" to do this. They also sell this technology to Snadhya'rune, which allows her to have a daughter, Kalki, with Mel'arnach, without alerting her mother.
    • Or Mel'arnach, at that
  • The trolls in Homestuck have genders, but the way their reproduction works (it involves buckets and a "mother grub" who takes genetic material and combines it into an "incestuous slurry") means that it's possible for a child to have multiple parents, including same-gender ones.
  • As revealed in the final story arc of And Shine Heaven Now: the boy that will grow up to be Vampire Hunter D is somehow Integra Hellsing and Seras Victoria's son. Only they know how that happened, and they aren't telling.


Web Original


Western Animation

  • "Roman Numeral One", or "Romy", was meant to be a clone of Brain, but some of Pinky's DNA ended up in the mix, producing what Pinky (and eventually Brain) treats as the duo's son. One of the more Ho Yay-filled episodes of the series, with a decent amount of Parental Bonus.
  • Transformers, being a One-Gender Race with a few rare exceptions, can do this. Two examples would be Sumdac and Megatron making Soundwave in Transformers Animated and Ratchet and Wheeljack making the Dinobots in Transformers Generation 1. It is worth noting, however, than no "reproduction" in the biological sense is involved- they simply make a chassis and either program in a "soul" or give it a soul via MacGuffin application. As long as the parties involved have the requisite know-how, transformer reproduction can be performed by two male super-intelligent iguanas if the need arises.
  • Played for Laughs in The Ren and Stimpy Show Adult Party Cartoon. The aptly titled episode "Stimpy's Pregnant" starts with Stimpy having typical pregnancy symptoms, which he has to explain himself of to Ren. Despite them having a child is biologically impossible, neither complain or question it; Ren even says "You said you'd use protection!". It is later revealed that it was not, in fact, a child, but Stimpy's excrement (even though he went through lactation and had his waters flow out). They never find out, because the delivering doctor didn't wan't to "break their hearts".
    • It was a living creature nonetheless!
  • In Gargoyles, Delilah was produced from the DNA of Demona and Elisa.
  • Following the comics, Superboy in Young Justice is revealed to be a combination of the DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor in the episode "Agendas." Given that this was in the comics this also counts as an I Knew It! for many fans of both.


Real Life

  • In Real Life scientists have managed to extract male sperm from female stem cells, and hope to extract eggs from male cells in the near future. While legislation will undoubtedly take its time to catch on, there is now theoretically (very expensive) means for lesbian couples to have children without a man. Such children would always be female. And that's not all - it has been demonstrated in animal experiments that it's possible to make a child inherit the genes of three parents - the implications for unorthodox family structures are pretty interesting.
    • Although the result doesn't usually thrive, it is possible for one of the 'waste' cells formed during female meiosis, the polar body, to fuse with an egg producing a zygote. If the problems are ever overcome, any two females could produce a child without the need to engineer sperm cells.
    • In Australia, the Howard Government enacted pre-emptive legislation that made it illegal to create a viable embryo with anything other than egg and sperm cells. Though theoretically possible to create a zygote with only female cells, anyone who attempted it would be prosecuted. This was most likely because, thanks to the field of genetic manipulation being very new, the child would be very susceptible to deformities and a higher chance of death in infancy.
    • As far as working on making children from two fathers, it's significantly harder, as eggs become the core of an embryo while sperm is little more than genetic information. There are a few ideas, but in practice it's quite a ways away still. Also, YY combinations must be avoided because they don't work, so effectively, the children will be male 2/3 of the time and female 1/3 of the time.
      • That doesn't even get into the fact that there'd need to be a surrogate mother to actually carry the baby, or an artificial womb outside of a body (while there could in theory be male pregnancies, they would be extremely dangerous, and the technology required to make them would be more difficult than a completely artificial womb altogether)
  • You could say that Dolly the sheep had three biological mothers: one that the nuclear DNA was taken from, one that the egg cell was taken from, and one that it was implanted in.
  • The Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizard, an all-female species, reproduces strictly through cellular meiosis (no fertilization of eggs required), while ovulation is enhanced by what basically amounts to lizard-lesbianism.
  • An experiment was done to see if bi-maternal mice have longer lives by changing some eggs to behave like sperm.
  • Mice from two genetic fathers.
  • Similar to the The Broken Hearts Club example above, actor BD Wong and his partner had twins using an egg donated by his partner's sister.
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