When I came out to my mum as an 18-year-old in 1988, she was accepting and encouraging. She was unusually progressive for the times. Yet one of the sadder conclusions she drew from my disclosure was, “I won’t get any grandchildren then.”

That was the blanket assumption back then. Lesbians were not parents. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had just introduced Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which outlawed the promotion of homosexuality. IVF was only a decade old. And it would be twenty years before the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act would recognise same-sex couples as legal parents of children conceived through the use of donated sperm, eggs or embryos.

I moved to London, started partying at gay clubs and discovered an alternative sense of family that centred on friendships rather than traditional models of marriage and kids. Embedded in a supportive queer community where parenthood felt equally impossible for all, I made peace with the prospect of never ever becoming a mum. Yet as time wore on, as I crept into my 30s, I began to feel more and more conflicted. Whenever I fell in love with a new partner, I would think, ‘What would our children look like?’ I would dream about those children at night and then wake up to a nagging sadness that they did not, and could not, exist.

LGBTQ motherhood: “What it means to have not been able to become a mum”