“Not cool, Al Trautwig”. Fed up with classmates asking if I knew my “real parents” (anyone I talk to for more than 90 minutes will learn that I’m adopted), I sat down at my family’s Macintosh LCII and hunted and pecked my way through the hard-hitting think piece that would set the record straight on adoption forever. During the commentary, he remarked: “Biles was raised by her grandfather and his wife, and she calls them “Mum and Dad”.
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The Texas resident arrived at the Olympics having already won more World Championship gold medals than any other gymnast in history.
Recommended: How much do you know about the Olympics? In doing so, he touched on an issue many adoptive parents face. But in this situation, Simone has made it perfectly clear to the world that these are her parents.
When I spoke to her Tuesday, Netzer said Trautwig’s comments demonstrated a lack of empathy. @jenunexpected “doesn’t get why this is so hard to understand” and neither do I. But, of course, this wasn’t the end of it. “They don’t really understand its permanence”. The eyes of the law consider them her parents. “It is permanent and forever”.
Some of Biles’ success is due to the support her parents provide, as well as her Christian faith.
The network ran a profile of Biles on Sunday that noted she and younger sister Adria were adopted because their birth mother struggled with drugs and alcohol. A woman tweeted at Trautwig to edit his tweet, he replied “they can be her dad and mom but not her parents”. Trautwig’s statement was a good first step, she said.
“I feel like they’re defaming my character”, Shanon seethed in her video message. “I’ve gotten better, life goes on and that’s my past and that’s what it should be left at, the past”. In the segment that aired before the women’s gymnastics all-around preliminary competition, Biles shrugged off questions about her family, saying that there is “no story” because it’s “always been this way” for her.
However, the elder Biles has just returned to the spotlight, granting an interview with TMZ. Black children also have longer wait times in foster care: 29 months compared to the 22.4 month wait in general, and nearly a year longer than white children (18.3 months).
Families whose lives have been touched by adoption were understandably upset by the suggestion that adoptive parents aren’t “real” parents. But Shannon claims to have been sober since 2007, and she doesn’t appreciate being depicted otherwise, especially by her father. Government authorities appear to believe that maltreatment of Black children results from pathologies intrinsic to their homes and that helping them requires dislocating them from their families.
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But you! On an global stage, in a broadcast that millions of people were watching, you opened the door for a lesson in appropriate adoption language.
