Heterosexual marriage and childbirth as a “natural course of life”

Although municipal governments have publicly recognized same-sex partnership in Japan since 2015, or the so-called LGBT boom, families of sexual minorities are still rendered socially invisible in Japanese society. After World War II, the popularization of the heterosexual nuclear family took place throughout the period of high economic growth of the 1970s and became the prototype of child-raising as we know it today. Those who may have identified with LGBT then were no exception. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the patterns of parenthood and childbirth in Japan before the “LGBT boom” by conducting interviews with four sexual minority families who were born between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Their assigned gender at birth was female, and they married a male in their 20s. After giving birth to children, they decided to live as a sexual minority. The norms of heteronormative marriage were too strong for them to identify as non-heterosexual/transgender from a younger age. For these persons, to get married to a man was a “natural course of life.”