1555 Sherman Ave, #173
Evanston, Illinois 60201
Contact
Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

  1. What Information Do We Collect? When you visit our website you may provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected on an individual basis and website use information collected on an aggregate basis as you and others browse our website.
  2. Personal Information You Choose to Provide We may request that you voluntarily supply us with personal information, including your email address, postal address, home or work telephone number and other personal information for such purposes as correspondence, placing an order, requesting an estimate, or participating in online surveys. If you choose to correspond with us through email, we may retain the content of your email messages together with your email address and our responses. We provide the same protections for these electronic communications that we employ in the maintenance of information received by mail and telephone.
  3. Website Use Information Similar to other websites, our site may utilize a standard technology called "cookies" (see explanation below, "What Are Cookies?") and web server logs to collect information about how our website is used. Information gathered through cookies and server logs may include the date and time of visits, the pages viewed, time spent at our website, and the sites visited just before and just after ours. This information is collected on an aggregate basis. None of this information is associated with you as an individual.
  4. How Do We Use the Information That You Provide to Us? Broadly speaking, we use personal information for purposes of administering our business activities, providing service and support and making available other products and services to our customers and prospective customers. Occasionally, we may also use the information we collect to notify you about important changes to our website, new services and special offers we think you will find valuable. The lists used to send you product and service offers are developed and managed under our traditional standards designed to safeguard the security and privacy of all personal information provided by our users. You may at any time to notify us of your desire not to receive these offers.
  5. What Are Cookies? Cookies are a feature of web browser software that allows web servers to recognize the computer used to access a website. Cookies are small pieces of data that are stored by a user's web browser on the user's hard drive. Cookies can remember what information a user accesses on one web page to simplify subsequent interactions with that website by the same user or to use the information to streamline the user's transactions on related web pages. This makes it easier for a user to move from web page to web page and to complete commercial transactions over the Internet. Cookies should make your online experience easier and more personalized.
  6. How Do We Use Information Collected From Cookies? We use website browser software tools such as cookies and web server logs to gather information about our website users' browsing activities, in order to constantly improve our website and better serve our users. This information assists us to design and arrange our web pages in the most user-friendly manner and to continually improve our website to better meet the needs of our users and prospective users. Cookies help us collect important business and technical statistics. The information in the cookies lets us trace the paths followed by users to our website as they move from one page to another. Web server logs allow us to count how many people visit our website and evaluate our website's visitor capacity. We do not use these technologies to capture your individual email address or any personally identifying information about you.
  7. Notice of New Services and Changes Occasionally, we may use the information we collect to notify you about important changes to our website, new services and special offers we think you will find valuable. As a user of our website, you will be given the opportunity to notify us of your desire not to receive these offers by clicking on a response box when you receive such an offer or by sending us an email request.
  8. How Do We Secure Information Transmissions? When you send confidential personal information to us on our website, a secure server software which we have licensed encrypts all information you input before it is sent to us. The information is scrambled en route and decoded once it reaches our website. Other email that you may send to us may not be secure unless we advise you that security measures will be in place prior to your transmitting the information. For that reason, we ask that you do not send confidential information such as Social Security, credit card, or account numbers to us through an unsecured email.
  9. How Do We Protect Your Information? Information Security -- We utilize encryption/security software to safeguard the confidentiality of personal information we collect from unauthorized access or disclosure and accidental loss, alteration or destruction. Evaluation of Information Protection Practices -- Periodically, our operations and business practices are reviewed for compliance with organization policies and procedures governing the security, confidentiality and quality of our information. Employee Access, Training and Expectations -- Our organization values, ethical standards, policies and practices are committed to the protection of user information. In general, our business practices limit employee access to confidential information, and limit the use and disclosure of such information to authorized persons, processes and transactions.
  10. How Can You Access and Correct Your Information? You may request access to all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain in our database by emailing us using the contact form provided to you within the site structure of our website.
  11. Do We Disclose Information to Outside Parties? We may provide aggregate information about our customers, sales, website traffic patterns and related website information to our affiliates or reputable third parties, but this information will not include personally identifying data, except as otherwise provided in this privacy policy.
  12. What About Legally Compelled Disclosure of Information? We may disclose information when legally compelled to do so, in other words, when we, in good faith, believe that the law requires it or for the protection of our legal rights.
  13. Permission to Use of Materials The right to download and store or output the materials in our website is granted for the user's personal use only, and materials may not be reproduced in any edited form. Any other reproduction, transmission, performance, display or editing of these materials by any means mechanical or electronic without our express written permission is strictly prohibited. Users wishing to obtain permission to reprint or reproduce any materials appearing on this site may contact us directly.
Terms & Conditions

Terms & Conditions

Donation Refund Policy

We are grateful for your donation and support of our organization. If you have made an error in making your donation or change your mind about contributing to our organization please contact us. Refunds are returned using the original method of payment. If you made your donation by credit card, your refund will be credited to that same credit card.

Automated Recurring Donation Cancellation

Ongoing support is important to enabling projects to continue their work, so we encourage donors to continue to contribute to projects over time. But if you must cancel your recurring donation, please notify us.
© Activism in Adoption

Transgender Awareness Week: Gendered Language in Adoption

byKristin Thomas

It is Transgender Awareness Week in the United States, and in this week, transgender people and their allies bring awareness and engage in advocacy around issues of prejudice, discrimination, and violence against transgender and non-binary people. This week ends on the Transgender Day of Remembrance, an annual observance on November 20th, which honors the memory of transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence. Started in 1999 by transgender advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith as a vigil to honor the memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman killed in 1998, it is now a national memorial to those we have lost. 

You may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with your mission? As it turns out, a lot. 

Activism in Adoption sits in a unique position in the adoption landscape, for several reasons. First of all, we maintain an absolutely neutral position on adoption, which creates a safe space for everyone in the adoption constellation to come together and learn. Secondly, we don't work in adoption - we aren't an extension of adoption agencies; we don't facilitate any aspect of adoption - which means our presenters are free to express their unvarnished and nuanced takes about adoption, drawing on their lived experiences to the benefit of everyone in the adoption constellation. Third, we use this educational platform to provide a voice for members of the adoption constellation who are the most silenced in adoption narratives - adopted people and birthparents - allowing them to speak without censure or to uphold any point of view other than their own. 

However, we often find ourselves stuck using the same gendered adoption language used by adoption agencies and adoption professionals,all of which is rooted in a very specific and narrow kind of gender conformity and heteronormativity. If the purpose of Transgender Awareness Week is to educate about transgender and gender non-conforming people and the issues associated with their transition or identity, in the adoption landscape one of those issues has to do with the ways in which the language of adoption can be a form of erasure.

If you follow us (or On Your Feet Foundation) on social media, or read our website or newsletters, you may have noticed that we use a lot of gendered language to identify birthparents, but we know that that the same language that helps some people find us on Google can also make other people feel unwelcome, and we don’t want anyone to feel that way. In the adoption industry,  advocates for Positive Adoption Language do so because it is meant to be neutral; to not rob either adoptees or birthparents of their dignity. However, positive adoption language is not intersectional: it still relies heavily on prescriptive gender assumptions. Birthmom. First Mother. And these terms are great for someone to choose to use for themselves if they feel like a fit, and for a lot of people, they do feel that way. However, not everyone that gives birth feels comfortable using the gendered word ‘mother’, and while the term birthgiver is gaining traction, it doesn’t describe the unique position of both giving birth and then placing a child for adoption in the same way birthmother does. We also struggle with how to introduce better, more accurate terminology into our educational work, especially since our presenters are talking about their own lived experiences and our audience often finds us both from referrals and Google searches. 

The gendered and prescriptive language used in adoption makes it nearly impossible for us to be findable without using that same language, and with that use comes unintentional but very real built-in gender assumptions. Change happens slowly. We saw that first as the adoption industry slowly moved to more neutral, less shaming language in the Positive Adoption Language movement, and now we are watching the shift past that language movement to a new one, that is both more encompassing and more compassionate and neutral, and hopefully we will see it continue to shift to terminology that is also less gendered and more inclusive.

And while we wait for that to happen, we want to remind our community of learners that regardless of how you identify or the pronouns you use, if you want to expand your adoption education, we are here for you. We are here for the transgender, gender-fluid, and non-binary members of the adoption constellation. We are here to listen to, and learn from, your lived experience, and we are here to push the needle forward on changing the way the world views adoption, and everyone within the adoption constellation.