Ep 16 Queer Mama

In this week's episode of Sperm Sisters, we're joined by our very first guest, Freya Lyon (@thequeermama) a second-generation queer mum who is donor conceived and has gone on to use a donor herself.

Freya shares her incredible story, from navigating a sibling network that's even bigger than ours to building a meaningful relationship with her donor (who, we're delighted to report, sounds like a genuinely lovely bloke).

We also talk about the two wonderful mums who raised her, how growing up in a loving LGBTQ+ family shaped the parent she is today, and what it's like raising donor-conceived children with openness from the very beginning.

Insightful, heartwarming and packed with wisdom, this is one of those conversations that stays with you long after the episode ends.

A huge thank you to Freya for being so generous, honest and hilarious. You're officially an honorary Sperm Sister 💛

If you're looking for brilliant content on queer parenting, donor conception and modern family life, give Freya a follow on Instagram: @thequeermama.

🎙️ Sperm Sisters Podcast - Queer Mama

🎧 Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all podcast platforms to be notified when new episodes drop.
📺 Watch every episode on YouTube.
📱 Follow us on Instagram for behind-the-scenes chaos, bonus clips and sister updates.

--------------------------------------

Get in touch and share your story with us, we're looking to interview people on upcoming episodes! 

Email us at: spermsisterspod@gmail.com

Whatsapp your questions: (+44)7507 834096

Follow us on insta: @spermsisterspodcast

Subscribe on YouTube: @SpermSistersPodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Doobida ba ba ba-da ba ba ba-da ba spisters.

SPEAKER_05 0:17

This is a story about sisters. Just not the kind that you're expecting.

SPEAKER_03 0:22

Three years ago we were strangers, living separate lives.

SPEAKER_04 0:25

Now we know we're biological sisters, connected by the same sperm donor. And that's just the beginning.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

This podcast dives headfirst into the how, the why, and the uncomfortable questions no one seems to want to answer.

SPEAKER_04 0:38

Uncovering secrets the medical world would rather keep buried.

SPEAKER_05 0:42

How many donor-conceived people are there really? No one can give a straight answer. Not the clinics, not the system, no one.

SPEAKER_04 0:50

So, how many siblings could be walking past us every day without a clue? It's messy, it's shocking. At times it's almost impossible to believe.

SPEAKER_05 0:59

And somehow, it's also really funny.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

Come with us as we dig deeper, ask the uncomfortable questions and laugh our way through the chaos of discovering who we really are and just how many of us there might be.

SPEAKER_04 1:12

Coming up on this week's episode of Sperm Sisters.

SPEAKER_03 1:16

Hello everybody and welcome back to another spellbinding episode of Sperm Sisters. For this very special episode, we were joined by Freya, otherwise known as the Queer Mama. Freya is a UK-based creator and advocate who provides a really rare three-dimensional perspective on donor conception. She was raised by a same-sex couple using a sperm donor in the 1990s and is now a mother to two donor-conceived children with her wife and has been an egg donor herself. She is an absolute fountain of knowledge, and we feel incredibly privileged to have got to interview her for this episode this week. Join us at the end of this episode for our Sperm Sisters Mailbag, where we will be answering some of your questions. Thank you to all of you who have messaged in this week with lots of great questions to be answered. So, as always, we shall start by introducing ourselves. My name is Natasha. I'm the eldest of the three sisters and I'm 36 years old.

SPEAKER_04 2:18

Sorry. Oh my God. Do you just want to do sperm sisters? Because I'm fine with that.

SPEAKER_05 2:27

Sorry. Did you were you reading that or was that from your head? I was reading it.

SPEAKER_04 2:32

Oh, thanks for that. Okay. Hello everyone. My name's Gemma. I'm the middle sister. Um Helen, you can't be yawning. Sorry.

SPEAKER_05 2:45

Can you just do it again, Deb? I really couldn't hold that one in. Good.

SPEAKER_04 2:49

I think it's fine to lead straight on to you. The yawner of the justifiably yawning.

SPEAKER_05 2:57

I am I know I said before that I was in the postpartum trenches, but oh my god, am I really in the trenches? I am so tired and running on like genuinely no sleep. But my name is Helen. I am 35 years old and I'm the youngest of the three sisters.

SPEAKER_04 3:20

And with that, please enjoy Freya's interview. Thank you so much, Freya, for joining us on Sperm Sisters. You are the first person that we're interviewing, which is so exciting. And you're a fountain of knowledge because you are donor-conceived, and to have your children, you used a am I right in thinking a sperm donor?

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Yes. Yes, we did.

SPEAKER_04 3:46

I don't know like which bit to start off with because I just want to ask you everything. Firstly, I mean what I was wondering was it would be great to know more about you. What? Or maybe are you from the Wild West era of donor conception?

SPEAKER_02 4:01

No. Well, I'm the in-betweeny bit. So I'm 1994. So I am after 1991. So the regulations were in place. There was a 10-family limit. Um, everything was recorded. I'm gonna say that with quotation marks. Um, but then it was before uh they turned into open ID. So it was still lifelong anonymity at that stage. So I was that period of conception. So considerably more than than yeah, before 1991.

SPEAKER_05 4:34

But did you ever receive any before you traced your donor, did you ever receive any information, like identifying information at all, or no? No.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

So um I got a letter when I was 16 and it was an update. Again, quotation marks because it wasn't, but they claimed it was an updated um kind of profile on the donor in terms of his career. I think we got job, but that was considerably wrong. That was still the job when he donated, and he was a student, so yeah. Um, and then it had his eye colour, hair colour, height, and weight. Uh, weight was wrong, apparently, or quite generous. Um and and yeah, that was it. There was, I think it maybe had three words of um sporty um likes music or something like that, but that was that was it. So that's all I got that at 16.

SPEAKER_04 5:26

At 16, that's a really tough age, isn't it, to be given cure biological makeup from the other side? I personally would have really struggled at 16, I think.

SPEAKER_02 5:37

I was very interested, I was very curious, and it came it came along with a table of my siblings as well. So um it then had my there were 15 of us in our half-sibling group, and it had the years that we were born, and then how many of each gender in each year. So we were across four years. I was one of the eldest, and my sister was the youngest, so we were kind of bookend babies. Um so yeah, I was more interested in that bit, to be fair. I wasn't that fussed about the height and weight. I don't know. I couldn't use that to build a picture, so it wasn't useful. Um, but the siblings I was far more interested in. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 6:16

So you got and I like who's who? But I guess you didn't get their names or anything. So did you kind of feel like you wanted to track these people down and you had like a list?

SPEAKER_02 6:28

Yeah, instantly. I had an idea of where I fit into it. Um I knew I was one of the oldest, but I kind of I'm I'm a summer baby, so I was like, well, there's probably some before me. Um and then I knew my sister was the youngest because there was only one born in her year, and then that was kind of it. And it was interesting, there were way more girls, so I was like, oh, that's cool. But that was it. Yeah, it was kind of it was really hard again to build any kind of picture of something very minimal, to be fair, but it was still more than I'd had for 16 years, so it was still a lot at that point.

SPEAKER_05 6:58

So had you always known that you were donor conceived?

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Or did you find oh you'd always known since it was a very open topic in our house, really. Um I don't particularly remember finding out for the first time, so it was literally just uh always always talked about.

SPEAKER_05 7:17

Yeah, which I get which now obviously is the recommended route.

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 7:22

And from your experience, do you think the fact that you'd known all your life that maybe oh I don't know, I'm putting words into your mouth. Is that why is that why you didn't focus so heavily on the donor side of the information that you would had received and maybe the sibling side?

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Yeah, very possibly. I think I'd always try to have a picture in my head of what he looks like. My mums were able to tell me that he was a student when he donated, so we had a kind of idea of what he was like. My mum was convinced he was gay because it came back that he didn't have any kids as like the update. Um again, that was wrong. Um but but we kind of had this kind of idea of him, and he we got told word of mouth that he was um a street performer, and my mums really liked that because they they're both musicians, so they were like, Oh, that's cool, he's artistic. So we had this idea, street performer, I was conceived in London, so I always had yeah, I had a maybe a slight picture in my head, but I really couldn't make it very focused, so I didn't I didn't think much about it. The siblings were far more interesting to me because I knew I could find them. But with the donor, because I was told I never would, I didn't really focus much on it, to be honest. Yeah.

unknown 8:33

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 8:35

I just can't imagine I can't get over just the whole thing of not being given a list of people. And then you must have just like looked at others walking around the place thinking, we look a bit similar.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Oh yeah, I still do.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

Oh god, yeah, all the time. We've got a I mean, this is skipping ahead slightly, but I have a group chat with my half siblings, and we will drop in the chat when we've seen someone that looks like us. Go, do we think this could be one of ours? Like it's got the same nose or something like that. We do that all the time. Wow. I mean, have have you since tracked all 15 of you? No, no. There are, and I have to work this out every time. I think there are eight of us in contact with each other. And and then we recently got an updated list, um, and there were two more on that list. So there are actually 17 of us, not 15 of us.

SPEAKER_04 9:24

An updated list.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Yeah, so my donor removed his anonymity with the HFEA, which he wasn't aware you could do. I don't think many people do know you could do. And when he did that, he got sent a letter from the HFEA saying, okay, here is a list of your offspring. And for the most part, the table was the same as ours, but there was one that was an added year after my sister was born. So that was like, oh my gosh, we thought she was the youngest. And then there was another one where it said, Um, we don't know whether this person had a live birth because it was never reported to the HFEA. So they knew of a pregnancy, but we've since discovered that brother. And he was like, Oh yeah, my um my mum never went back and told the clinic that I was born. So um so we've tracked down that one already. But but yeah, so we suddenly expanded by two, which is why I'm always a little bit hesitant to to actually number how many of us there are because it still feels a bit of an unknown, to be honest. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:19

We always feel like we're we're waiting for an update. And there's not many of us that we're aware of. There are probably we are assuming hundreds.

SPEAKER_05 10:30

There must be so many more, but apparently, girls are more likely to go searching than boys are. Interesting. Um can't remember where I've read that, so we'll have to do like a little fact check. But I know that is true. So I do, and our side currently all girls. So I wonder if that's why.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Well, actually, out of the siblings that have found each other, there are less girls in our current sibling group going on. There's only there's four girls. Oh no, oh my gosh, yeah, we've equalised, we've got a new one. See, this is it, I can't keep track because we have them join. We had two new ones last year, and so yeah, my my total keeps changing in my head. But we've got like there's a staple four of my siblings that I've known for quite a while now. So they're always the kind of staple lot. So there's there's six of us that have known each other since 2016. So we've yeah, we've had a while of knowing each other, but then the others have have joined in, which I think is harder. I think it's harder to be a sibling joining an existing sibling group.

SPEAKER_04 11:37

How do you approach that as a group when you get someone else added to the list? Do you kind of have a Cobra style meeting and then get together?

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Um, so I have been somehow appointed, and my donor does joke this, that I've become the kind of a leader of it. I was the first to make contact with him, and then I was the first to make contact with some of my half-siblings. So I've then done all of the introductions and managed all of that. As the older sister, I've just taken that role. I've just gone, okay, I'll manage these emotions.

SPEAKER_04 12:07

Think of yeah related, that's me.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

But every time we then match with a half-sibling, it's generally me finding out because I'm the one on the sites. So I'm on Ancestry, I'm on my heritage, and I'm also signed up to the donor sibling link. Now, I think a couple of my siblings now are because obviously I've matched with them on it, but they're maybe less active or less interested. So I'm generally the one that gets it first. So I will get, for example, last year I was sat at the airport about to do a nine-hour flight to America, and I got uh in literally sat at Heathrow, got an email saying you have new DNA matches. And I don't know if you guys I get them constantly, but they're like fifth cousins, they're so boring. So I just clicked on it, I alright, and it was brother at the top, it was half brother, and I was like, oh shit. And I was sat with people that I wasn't actually that close to, so I was kind of going, uh, I don't really know what to do with this. And I instantly just took a screenshot and put it straight in our group chat with my siblings because I was like, I'm about to do a nine-hour flight. These guys can go and do some digging on that name. So I just dropped it in and they then went nuts and did their searches. So actually, by the time I got off the plane, they'd done a whole deep dive. So we now we kind of work as a team, but I generally am the one that yeah, facilitates the starts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:20

Oh my god, I wonder if that's the same with all donor sibling networks. Because you kind of you do need someone at the forefront to be the one that pushes.

SPEAKER_05 13:31

I think you need a leader to organize it.

SPEAKER_02 13:34

It's chaos, otherwise. It is. Or I'm telling myself that anyway and make myself feel better.

SPEAKER_04 13:42

I feel the same way because I'm the one that writes the message first. I'm the one that tracked down our donor. Well, Helen and I did it together. I think when you get used to that level of intensity and the pressure of that moment, it kind of you're calmer and it's not so scary each time you do it. Yes. That's so I find it's it's still really emotional and because ultimately you don't want them to be the odd one out, like the new kid at school. You know, you want to be like, Do you want to come and hang? Do you want to come and sit?

SPEAKER_02 14:16

Yeah. So I'm very much like, oh, I don't want this to be overwhelming. Our newest half-sibling, she interestingly, she matched with me on Ancestry around the same time that I found that that half brother, maybe just a bit before, but she sent me a message on my Instagram, which is a public Instagram where I talk about donor conception. She sent me a message on there and it simply said, Is this you? And then no picture came through. So I read that and went, is this a scam? I don't know. What's happening? So I replied saying, There's no photo, and then nothing, nothing happened. So I never, and I actually even I remember at the time saying to my wife, saying, It feels a bit like one of those Facebook ones where it's like a link and you don't want to click on the link. So I'd kind of left it, and then ages later, it she went, Oh, sorry, this picture was about six months, I'd say, gap between those messages. It says this picture, and it was a picture of ancestry with a match with me saying half sister. And I was like, Oh my god, why did why didn't this come through? A, why did this come through in my ancestry? And B, why didn't this photo come through six months ago? So she'd had six months of being able to see me online and getting an idea, and actually it was quite good that she'd been able to watch from a distance a bit about us, and she'd seen my half siblings in some of the videos, and she'd heard me talk about our donor, so she knew all of that. I wasn't having to do the whole script of, by the way, it's not just me, there's also all these guys, and there's our donor, which I normally have to do. It's just such a it's such a thin line to try and balance of like welcoming and not overwhelming and overbearing, of like, hi, this is who we are. Yeah, and I kind of I do feel for any more siblings that join now, I think it's gonna be harder and harder each time, sadly, because you're joining a really established group of people, really.

SPEAKER_04 16:02

One thing to pick up on that was that this this half sibling didn't know that she was donor conceived, but she she would have received information about her donor at 16 as well.

SPEAKER_02 16:12

No, so the I the I am a little bit um confused about this because of the 1991 bit, but I think it was that the parents could access that information. So I think my mum actually requested it for me um when I was 16. So I I could request that at 16, and at 18 she could request that I got put on the donor sibling link. So she did all that for me. So if you aren't aware that you're donor conceived, as much as you have the rights to do that, you actually don't know that you need to do that. Um so no one contacts you to say, hey, here's the details, sadly.

SPEAKER_05 16:49

Which obviously at the time, parents that don't ever mention it.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

So that was still the advice, really. It's yeah. Half of my half siblings had very similar advice, like the parents. And so far, two matches didn't know they were donor conceived. The rest of us did know for varying degrees. Some of them are birth like me, some of them they found out when they were teenagers, but they were told. So yeah, it's been a kind of yeah, lots of different experiences. But the two people that didn't know, it was a massive shock to the system because they first I think my half-brother said that they when we first got matched, they were like, Oh, has my dad had an affair? Like, is this a a kid from that? And I was like, that's totally fair to assume that that would be really normal. I think that's what you would think before anything else. Absolutely. Yeah, especially age-wise, we're very similar in age. So it was just that kind of, oh my god, my dad's like with someone else. So actually a relief, I think, for him when he went, Oh no, thank God.

SPEAKER_04 17:53

So going back to your mum's going through the treatment, and obviously you yourself have gone through the treatment as well. Yes. Did you feel like that was kind of like a really, I don't know, like an encouraging environment to be in? Because you're like, my mum's went through this and I'm going through this as well. Was that quite like a heartwarming moment, or was or did you feel trickier?

SPEAKER_02 18:16

It no, it was lovely, actually, because um we didn't we didn't give it much thought. I've always known that I'd need to use a donor. Like me and my wife got together quite young. We've been together since I was 19. So we did know when we had kids that would be the plan. We had a bit of a we went through stages of how we were going to do it. We did think about going uh with a clinic abroad, we did think about shipping, you used to be able to ship Cryos, which is a Danish sperm bank, to your home address in the UK. And we kind of liked that idea of actually, I didn't want anything, I didn't I didn't want all of the surgical stuff. I didn't want it to feel really clinical. But then the law had changed by the time we got around to that and they didn't ship to home addresses. And we were like, well, if we're gonna have to go with a clinic, let's go with a local clinic. And this was long before I'd even really thought about all of the ethics of massive sibling groups abroad. And I didn't know any of that, I didn't care. Like it was real, I all my head went was I'm pretty chill being donor-conceived, it'll be fine. That was kind of how I went. Um and I'm ashamed to say I didn't do any more research. But luckily, we ended up going with a local spon bank and and they were brilliant. But by the time we got to that point, we did all our tests and they were like, oh, uh, IUI will work for you. You're quite fertile. And we discovered that my mum had actually had IUI for me. So I was like, that's quite nice, not IVF. And it worked first time, and it worked first time for my mum with me. So that was quite nice. It felt like a mirror image. Me and my eldest daughter are a week apart. So actually, me and my mum were doing all of that at the same time of the year with the same treatment and everything, which was very nice. And then with our second daughter, it worked first time, and with my mum, with my sister, it worked first time. So all of that kind of mirrored I've got two daughters, my mum had two daughters, dark hair blonde, dark hair blonde. So all of it has been very um, yeah, it's felt very sweet to watch that kind of mirror, I don't know, 25 years later style thing of getting to live the same experience. And especially because my my biological mum is not alive anymore. I didn't get to ask her all of those questions, but I was getting to live that the the same way she did. So it did feel it made me feel closer to her, which was really cool.

SPEAKER_04 20:23

Oh, Fray, that's really that's quite gossip, actually. I think that's just really beautiful, like the fact that your mum was still part of the whole project. This no, it's not my lived experience at all, so I don't know why I'm getting so much for that. It's just because I'm also a mum, and it's it's so uh hard being donor-conceived and having kids, and then thinking part of my donor story is being passed down to these people and navigating it, but it sounds like you've you had like a really lovely process, like a thought process going through it, which is really great.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Um, for anyone in your position who is about to start going through the treatment that you went through, whether they're same-sex couples or or not, do you think there's like um there's a point before you start treatment where you have to hype yourself up for it or do you think my biggest advice of that at the starting of treatment is to listen to your own body because you're suddenly going into an environment where there's a lot of professionals telling you what to do. Um, and they know they know their stuff, and that's very helpful, but it's overwhelming, even if you're just doing IUI and not IVF, and yes, it's way less invasive. You don't have all the needles and you don't have all the hormones, but you're still being told by a doctor what to do. I had to advocate for myself quite a lot. I knew that I'd ovulated late, and they kept saying, you know, you've missed this cycle, it'll be next cycle. And I was like, I know I've not ovulated yet yet. Bring me in for a scan. And I did, and they they had the scan and they were like, Oh yeah, your egg's still there, we'll do the UI tomorrow, and I was like, I told you, and again, it worked both times for my kids. So if I hadn't advocated, it wouldn't be my kids because it would be a different egg, which blows my mind every single time. Oh, yeah. I was like, if I hadn't pushed to be like this one, yeah, I want to do it now, it wouldn't have been so yeah, and I had to do that both times because again, the second time around, I was still breastfeeding my eldest, and they were kind of saying you have to stop breastfeeding or it's not gonna work, you're not gonna ovulate. And I was like, I know it will, I'm I'm telling you it will. So we did a test cycle, and they were like, we won't do any treatment this one, we'll just check that you ovulate. And then I did, I got the ovulating solid smiley face and thing. So I rang up and I was like, Look, I've got this solid smiley face. Can I just do it now? And they were like, Oh no, it's meant to be a test cycle, it's not meant to be a real one. I was like, bring me in, scan me, and and I would like to do it now. And so they did, and they were like, fine, we'll we'll do it this cycle. And again, it worked. So I was like, it wouldn't be my youngest if I hadn't stood there going, I know it works.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

Good for you.

SPEAKER_02 22:55

Um and it's really hard. I think actually I was I'm normally rubbish at advocating for myself, but the second my kids are involved, I'm a lot better. So apparently, even before they were conceived, I was a bit better at that bit. Um because it kind of pushes you to be like, actually, no, you've gotta listen to me. But trusting your body is is a big thing. If you know something in your body, you're the one that's gonna know that best. Yes, still listen to professionals and they do know their job, but but do listen to yourself as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 23:24

When you grew up with both of your mums, knowing that you were Dana Conceived because they'd told you, and obviously that's something you've gone on with your children to uh just let it be the norm.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 23:36

Is there anything that you took from how they raised you and your sister that you've tried to implement with your children, or is there anything equally that you tried to do slightly differently?

SPEAKER_02 23:48

So the biggest thing that I've tried to do the same or kind of emulate is that my parents made it so casual. There was no big dinner table sit-down reveal of it. It was never a heavy topic. It was just something, again, I have no memory of not knowing. I just always knew. And I've definitely tried to do that with our kids. And and my parents didn't have all the books that I have now, they didn't have the kind of things to help the conversation, so they just did it winging it and by talking about it. And they didn't have much of a model there because the advice was still not to talk about it. So I've tried to take that and make it as casual as possible. So for my kids, it's never a let's sit down and have a really heavy topic. It's it's very kind of, hey, you know, uh actually you're you're really good at running and your your donor runs marathons, so maybe that's why. And it's just kind of dropping in stuff like that. And I think that's worked really well for my kids because they're they're very solid in what they know about their donor, and I hope that it will give them that confidence that I had because I was very chill. If someone ever questioned me on it, I was like, yeah, and it was so not a thing. The only thing I think I do differently now is that I have to have more conversations with people in in their lives. So I do talk to the school about it, about how you're gonna talk about that. I was raised during section 28, so it wasn't even possible for the school to acknowledge that had two mums, let alone talk about donor conception. So there was another kid in my class as a kid that had two mums, and I remember the pair of us kind of were like, great, we're gonna stick together. Um, but it was that that's something definitely that I've had to navigate very differently to how my parents were able to navigate it.

SPEAKER_04 25:23

That's also a slightly different cattle of fish, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:27

God, you've lived you've lived through it all, Freya.

SPEAKER_05 25:30

Bloody hell. But I do, I wonder if that's also why you are so chilled though. Because it's like you've you've had so much of it the whole time.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

You're sort of like, well, it just is what it is. I'm very casual about chatting with it because my hope is that if I'm if I'm the first person somebody talks to about donor conception and they get to ask all the questions, that the next time they come across someone that's donor conceived, that they they won't be an arsehole about it. They'll be far more kind of casual about it because they've had that conversation, they've asked all the maybe vaguely inappropriate questions or curiosity and stuff like that, and got it out of their system so that the next time they're like, Oh yes, I spoke about this. Um that's kind of my my goal, really. And I I think I've had a bit of a knock-on effect in a positive way, hopefully, because my donor now is very active in talking about it. So he does the same as me, goes on podcasts, he talks to people for articles, he talks to his mates about it, about donor conception in a way that I don't think 50-year-old men normally chat about kind of offspring and genetics and stuff like that. So we're kind of trying to very slowly break down those awkwardness barriers that people get when they've got no clue about this world.

SPEAKER_04 26:44

So what books or what resources do you think are really helpful for people if they would like to tell their children that they're donor conceived? Or how what I don't know, where would they go for advice? Do you think?

SPEAKER_02 26:56

There's um there's the Donor Conception Network that do a lot of resources and stuff like that for talking to kids. They also do have some books on there. For me, it's definitely just starting as young as you can. There's some brilliant, very young books in terms of talking about donor conception. There's like Zach Safari, is one of my favourite ones for two mum families. But then you've got You Began as a Wish, which is very sweet and very gorgeous illustrations, and that's for anyone that's used assisted reproduction really in any way. And then there is Robo Babies, which is very sweet because it's not specifically about like donor conception, but it's using robots to be like some robots need other robots to carry their babies, which is very cool. Um, and Our Hearts Match, which is dinosaurs, and again, it's the idea of that's more specifically egg donation, but the idea of hatching someone else's egg and looking different and stuff like that. There's so many that are aimed for young kids, and I think when people go, Oh no, I can't have that conversation yet, it's like there's literally, you don't even have to start it. You could just read the book, just just read the book and see what your kid says. And then the next time you read the book, throw in a couple more sort of personalized things about it, like, oh yeah, we we know that because you're blonde and and your donor's blonde. And then the next time you read it, say, Have you got any questions about that? Have you thought about that? And some kids will have no interest whatsoever. Like it will take a long time for them to go, oh, actually, I'm gonna ask some questions. Our youngest does not care. She's three, she really does not care. She'll know about it. We read the books, but she's like, nah. Our five-year-old is very curious as a kid and very thoughtful. So she will mull on something for a very long time and then come back and say, now I've got all of these questions that I have about this. And so you've just got to kind of be ready to answer them. You don't need to have the perfect answers. It's also okay to even go, do you know what? Can I come back to you on that? Because I need to go and have a think, and then I'll come back and have a chat with you. I think kids respect it more when they see us really trying to earnestly answer their questions rather than fobbing them off. And as much as donor conception can feel kind of, I don't know, different or big, having a story on your shelf isn't highlighting a massive difference for your child. It's just chucking in, I've got books about everything for my kids. It's just another one. It's just one that happens to be, oh, we can personalise that a bit about you, actually.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

Um, never needs to be heavy.

SPEAKER_05 29:18

Okay, so Freya, obviously, when you were 16, you received the table of all your 15, well, now 17 siblings and brief information that was pretty non-identifying about your donor. Yeah. So how did that? Obviously, we know now that you do have a relationship with him. How did any of that come about?

SPEAKER_02 29:41

So, um, during COVID, I was heavily pregnant and not able to leave the house or work, and I got very bored. So I was doing a lot of my family tree on Ancestry. I had previously done an Ancestry DNA test and a My Heritage test, and neither of them had really had any matches. I'd never found a sibling on there or anything like that. But they were in the background, so I was then kind of doing my family tree based off that. And I got a message from someone that was a second cousin, and he was really interested how we could be matched because he was in Canada. So I was like, Oh, I don't know. But I said, I don't really know whether you're going to be my maternal side or my paternal side, because I don't know my paternal side, I'm don't conceived. And he went, Oh, well, you could put the raw data of your DNA test onto Jedmatch. And I was like, I don't know what that is. So he said, Well, it's if you put it on there, it can cross-match it with lots of different DNA tests rather than just ancestry or just my heritage. So I said, Okay, I'll give that a go. So I downloaded it and it came back with another second cousin match. But my two second cousins were not related to each other. So we knew that one was maternal, one was paternal. The person that was the first second cousin that I started talking to was very helpful and was helping me decode the data a bit. And he was like, Why don't you contact that second cousin and you can ask and find out maybe what side they're on. So I emailed this person. It turned out to be the mum of the second cousin was kind of managing the data doing a family tree. And she was in America. So I was like, oh, great. I still don't know what side we are. And she was very interested because she was doing her family tree and she wanted to figure out how we were matched. So she said, Ask me some questions, found out I was donut-conceived. And then I got an email back from her saying, I think I know who your dad is, is how she'd worded it. So I think I know who your dad is, and then vanished. And then I was like, Well, there's no way. I was like, she's American, she's however old. I was like, there's no, there's no chance. So um I left it, I then had a baby, didn't give it much thought. And when I was about three weeks postpartum, I was doing a night feed, sat up in bed, and I got her an email at about 2 a.m. And it was from her again saying, I was right, he is your father, here's his details. So she'd got him to go and do a DNA test thing to put it on the JED match, and it's come back as a paternal match. And so she'd given me his full name, and it was her nephew by marriage of some kind that she'd had an inkling that it fixed the right age and all of this. So I was like, right, I wanted to email him at 2 a.m. And my wife said maybe not. So I tried the next day, I sent this email out. And I kind of started off saying, Look, I you signed up to lifelong anonymity. So actually, if you don't want anything to do with me, I get it. Like that's fine. And actually, I think I would have been upset if he'd then gone, great, because I don't want anything to do with you. Uh but thankfully he sent back a nice long email. And we got on really easily straight away. Clicked really fast, had phone calls. He sounded, and I always joke this, but he sounded a bit like a Radio 4 presenter and very kind of nice voice, very like quite intelligent, liked to talk about books and stuff like this. And I was like, oh, Mum would have loved him. Like Mum would have been really happy that that was who the donor was. So kind of almost instantly we got on. I did then have to do the introduction of it's not just me, actually. There's like another five of us that I've now got to introduce you to. There's also 15 of us in total. He was shocked by that. He'd had this in his head that there was going to be 10, which I think lots of people have. And I was like, No, it's 10 families, doesn't mean 10 children. Yeah. Um, so he was really thrown by that. And but his first kind of email was like, I've always wondered about you. Like I've always thought about these people that I helped create. So he'd never really stopped wondering. He was a teacher. So he said every time he got a new year, like looking at the kids, he'd be like, Oh, the kids will be about this age, like I wonder what they're up to, wonder where they are. So we'd always thought about us. And yeah, we're now we're now very close. We try and meet up once a year at least. We he lives down in London and I've moved up north, so we've swapped over, which is really weird. So I'd always thought that he'd been in London as a kid, and he never was, and then he moved there. So that was really kind of strange to start realizing. And he has two kids of his own, so actually we added two more half siblings onto the list, which was yeah, more tell.

SPEAKER_05 33:50

Are you are you including them in the 17 or is that 19?

SPEAKER_02 33:54

No, that's 19. So um, and as much as we know about them, they're not yet kind of wanting to be a part of that, but they're teenagers, so I was like, Yeah, I wouldn't want to at that age either.

SPEAKER_04 34:06

Ah, must be hard for them because it's like, how do you share your dad?

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:11

Because I mean, they would see him as dad. Oh, for the we view him as oh we we view our donor as the donor really nice guy, but I would never call him dad. No. Because he's to me he's a bit of like an uncle figure.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

It's kind of how we view it. Yeah. Like I know he's my biological father, and I can see that. And and there's a very weird picture of us all if we've realized we've all got the same nose. But uh, but really, he's not a dad. He wasn't there for any of my childhood, any of the hard stuff. I love having him there now. I love being I'll text him, you know, when something happens. I share news with him, it's lovely. He's met the kids, he's been to birthday parties, he's yeah, it's it's that kind of I'm very happy that he's in my life, but he won't ever be a dad. And he definitely is a dad to them. So it's it's kind of almost nice to have that slight distance until maybe they're adults and they go, Oh, okay, we'll step in a bit to that.

SPEAKER_04 35:07

I feel for people who haven't had that response because we've heard of people who have been given restraining orders, been told to jog on and I think Jesus. I don't know how I would navigate that emotionally.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

It's just a rejection. It is a it's a massive rejection. And something that when I sent that email, I I had never for what 26 years, I had never wanted a biological father. I had no interest in knowing him. I was curious, but I'd never yearned to have him in my life. So it didn't, the second I met him, it didn't make me go, oh my god, I've I've ticked all those boxes, I know him, I'm complete. It was very nice. I got to ask him lots of questions about medical stuff that I wanted to know. I got to find out more about my family on that side, like grandparents and ancestors, but there was no kind of hole that needed to be filled in terms of knowing him. But I would have been gutted if he turned around and said no.

SPEAKER_04 36:02

Thank you so much for sharing so much of your story with us. And if people want to get in touch with you because you are such a beacon of knowledge. God, I'm fine, Gun. It's really embarrassing.

SPEAKER_02 36:17

Don't people? How can people find you? So I am on Instagram and TikTok, but more Instagram, um, as The Queer Mama. And I I will answer everything. I don't ignore messages. If I get a message asking me questions, I will happily have a chat. So yeah, please do. I think that one of the bigger things I've had of people coming and asking me questions is that curiosity of how I can have a relationship with my donor, but still respect the fact I have two mums. There's a lot of two mum families with young babies that are really scared of that. So I'm always really happy to have that chat. My non-biological mum is my best friend. Like she's literally, I call her every day. I annoy her all the time. But that that relationship in no way changed when I then got to meet my donor. I love having those conversations and I'm always very happy to chat with anyone. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_05 37:05

Just want to say thank you. I'm so sorry. She's suddenly she's okay.

SPEAKER_02 37:09

She's known the time.

SPEAKER_05 37:10

She's only ready to spring.

SPEAKER_04 37:14

Thank you so much to Freya for coming onto the podcast and being our first ever interviewee. We really, really appreciate her taking the time um to chat to us. And we really feel like we learned so much. So we hope that you guys took something from that too. If you've got any requests for people who you think we should interview, drop us a message. sperm sisterspod at gmail.com. Now, as promised, on to our brand new segment, sperm sisters mailbag.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Sperm sisters. Hello. I was just listening to your latest episode around how much it costs to get IUI and IVF. If it's your first child, you can you're eligible to get a round of IVF on the NHS. If you already have a child, you're like ruled out. You're like, nope, you've got one. We ain't giving you any more IVFs. So what would be interesting to discuss the fairness of that, and also it's a bit of a postcode lottery because waiting lists for rounds of IVF are going to be different in different parts of the country just because of like resources and the expertise in the NHS differing, and also sort of just the number of people that are of like birthing age that are trying to get pregnant. But you do get one round of IVF. So when it comes to money and how much things cost, there is ways to make things fertility treatment cheaper, but depends where you live. And if you've already got a child or not. Okay, bye.

SPEAKER_03 38:50

Thank you so much for sending that in, Lucy. So just a reminder for those of us that do need reminding, IUI is not the same as IVF. They are very, very, very different treatments. With IUI, sperm is placed directly into the uterus and fertilization happens like really naturally inside the body, whereas with IVF, eggs are fertilized in the lab um before an embryo is then transferred back into the uterus.

SPEAKER_04 39:20

As Lucy highlighted, there is like a postcode lottery. Depending on where you live, you will come under one of the 42 ICBs, which is the integrated care board, and they are the guys that decide what funding, what budgets go to your area for different things. Now, the people above that are called nice. Don't ask me what they stand for, but let's just call them the nice guys. They advise what all of the ICB should do. Nice recommend more than one round of IVF, but unfortunately, the majority of ICBs, maybe the one in the area that you're living in right now, only fund one round. That is mainly just in England. But in Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, the postcode lottery is better. There's not so much of a postcode lottery because it's all managed nationwide rather than individual little hubs.

SPEAKER_03 40:27

So we've done some fact checking and we have looked at some of the best funded ICBs as well as some of the worst funded areas. So these are generally considered the ones that I'm about to list are generally considered the most generous because they are closest to following nice guidelines. So the ICB North East London, they provide three full IVF cycles, plus one cycle for eligible people aged 40 to 42, which I think is really fantastic. We then have the North East and North Cumbria ICB. They also offer three full IVF cycles, plus one for 40 to 42 year olds. And then we also have the North Central London ICB. Again, they also provide three cycles, although the policy is structured slightly differently from the other two, which we won't go into in the for right now, but we may in a future episode. So those are among the sort of very few areas really that come close to NICE's recommendation of three cycles for um eligible patients under 40. Then you sort of have the next tier. Um, but to follow this, I'm just going to go straight in with the worst funded areas. And unfortunately, most of England now really funds only one cycle, which is um really quite sad. And many of those are only partial, so not full cycles, meaning that not all embryos that are created during treatment are necessarily transferred under NHS funding. But there is lots of campaigning happening which um through these campaigns have highlighted some really particularly restricted regions which include much of the northwest, including areas such as Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside, as well as Greater Manchester, many, many parts of the Midlands, and also several Southwest and Southeast ICBs.

SPEAKER_05 42:37

Well, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I think that's some serious food for thought. And to be honest, probably even more stuff that we can delve into deeper properly another time. But what an interesting episode. We've had Freya's amazing interview and now such an insightful question from Lucy. So speaking of questions, if hearing Lucy's question has now inspired you to ask your own, please don't forget that we have a WhatsApp number which we would love you to send your voice notes into. The number for that is at 075 078 34096. And we can't wait to hear from you and hopefully you might feature on the next episode of Sperm Sisters.

SPEAKER_04 43:25

Thanks so much for listening, guys. Bye. We say we say goodbye to them. Goodbye. Well done, Helen.