Radical Rehumanization for Adoptees

Why Do Adoptees Need Radical Rehumanization

The adoption system treats adoptees like objects when our rights, histories, and voices have been erased. Framed as a way to make families, adoption begins with loss from family separation that is connected to racism, misogyny, and poverty. Dominant myths about adoption enforce gratitude and rescue narratives, silence adoptee perspectives and truth telling, and dismiss our emotions. These myths are internalized by adoptees, causing shame, silence, and confusion, therefore, the voices that are centered most are adoptive parents and adoptions agencies.

Radical rehumanization is needed for adoptees to be able to claim: I am not an object. I am a whole person, whose experience matters.

What is Radical Rehumanization

Radical rehumanization for adoptees is an individual and collective process in which we reclaim our full personhood by centering adoptee voices, asserting our rights to identity, exposing and rejecting the racialized, gendered, and classed myths and policies that dehumanize us, and resisting patterns of shame and silence through truth-telling.

Below are ways that adoptees can actively engage in radical rehumanization:

Reclaim Your Story

• Name what happened
  Use clear language: “I was separated from my first family,” or “I experienced loss and rupture,” instead of “I was chosen” or “I’m lucky.”

• Challenge Internalized Myths
  Notice and push back on thoughts like, ”There’s something wrong with me” or “Differences don’t matter”

• Claim Complexity
  Adoption is complex. Give yourself permission to hold both: “I can love my adoptive family and still wish I wasn’t adopted.”

  Refuse Erasure

• Refuse Performative Gratitude
  When people push a savior narrative or say “You’re so lucky,” you can respond with: “Adoption is complicated for me,” or “There’s a lot of loss in it too.”

• Tell your Story on your Terms
  You don’t have to explain to anyone your adoption story, or where you’re from.

• Center Adoptee Language in your World
  Read, share, and cite adoptee-authored books, articles, podcasts, and research.

  Relationships & Boundaries

• Set Boundaries with Adoptive Family
  Around reunion, search, talking about your first family, racism, culture, mental health. You are not responsible for protecting their feelings from reality.

• Seek Adoption Competent Therapy
  Work with therapists who understand adoption trauma, identity, race, and intergenerational dynamics, not just “grateful adoptee” narratives.

• Join Adoptee only Spaces
  Groups, retreats, online communities that center adoptees

  Family, origins, and kinship

• Explore your origins (if it feels right)
  Search, reunion, DNA tests, cultural/ethnic reconnection, and language learning

• Honor invisible and extended kin
  Think beyond the legal family frame: siblings you never met, aunts, grandparents, communities who were impacted by your separation.

• Create Chosen Kinship
  Build “adoptee families,” friend-family, queer family, cultural family. Belonging isn’t limited to legal or biological ties

  Body & Health

• Claim your Medical and Ancestral History as a Human Right
  Advocate for access to records, health information, and ancestry as a basic human right.

• Listen to your Body
  Notice how your nervous system holds adoption (hypervigilance, fawning, trauma reenactments, shutdown, etc.) and work with somatic practices, not just cognitive ones.

• Refuse to Pathologize Yourself
  Instead of “There’s something wrong with me,” try: “My reactions make sense given what happened to me.”

  Collective and Political action

• Support Adoptee Led Organizations and Scholars
  Engage with critical adoption studies, adoptee researchers, and activists who connect adoption to race, class, disability, migration, and reproductive justice.

• Advocate for Policy Changes
  Open records, family preservation, kinship care, post-adoption support, accountability for agencies and states.

• Name Adoption as a Reproductive Justice Issue
  Link your story to larger systems: poverty, racism, criminalization, lack of support for first parents, colonialism, etc.

• Educate when you have Capacity
  Speak up in classrooms, professional spaces, and families when adoption is romanticized or oversimplified

  Creativity, culture, and meaning-making

• Make Art About It
  Write, paint, dance, sing. Turn “I can’t talk about this” into art.

• Ritualize your Story
  Letters (sent or unsent), ancestor altars, memorials, private ceremonies for lost names or birthdays. Anything that marks your experience as real and worthy of honor.

• Reimagine Family Narratives
  Create your own myths, metaphors, and stories of origin that hold your truth instead of erasing it.