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REVIEW: Why I Adopted My Husband Manga Review




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ChibiGoku



Joined: 29 May 2004
Posts: 677
PostPosted: Sat Oct 14, 2023 3:57 pm Reply with quote
There's a long history of adoption in the LGBTQ+ community that is worth giving a read up for anyone curious. It offered a form of protection for people who weren't able to legally marry, often against potential abuse from family members who would deny them such. Right now, even ignoring the legal thread of our rights being taken away from us, many of us are not able to marry and it comes down to the fact many of us are disabled. If you are on either SSI or SSDI DAC (which is different from standard SSDI, worth a read), we lose all of our benefits as a result of marrying. SSI is more complicated because if the spouse makes more than you, you lose it. With SSDI DAC, you just straight up lose it (unless you marry another SSDI or SSDI DAC person). I fall under the SSDI DAC issue.

While I'm also polyamorous and in a polycule, which causes additional issues, the bigger issue is trying to figure out how to resolve this perdicument. One thing I've considered is having my partner have power of attorney over me, though I need to look through the legalities of it. The other issue is while I am disabled, I'm older than my partner, so I'm unsure if adoption angle would work out in this situation for us and I'm actually not sure how my DAC benefits would be impacted by this angle.

There's a lot of unknown I haven't explored yet and sadly, for the world of the disabled, we are still not treated equal under law. We still don't have marriage equality, and what is there, is on the verge of possibility being overtaken. And that bill, Marriage Protection Act, which protects states and recognizes same-sex marriage where bills have been passed, was not even a compromise, as it allowed parties to give the right to discriminate, and it's already being actively used.

I still need to pick this manga up, but I definitely wanna give it a read since it's a reality of many queer people still around the world.
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whiskeyii



Joined: 29 May 2013
Posts: 2247
PostPosted: Sat Oct 14, 2023 6:48 pm Reply with quote
Weirdly enough, I was aware that adopting adults was a thing (at least in the US) in part because of the legal issues surrounding the Tuohy’s of The Blind Side fameand their son Michael Oher. Allegedly one of the reasons he was placed under a conservatorship rather than adopted was because he was 18 at the time, but turns out adoption of adults happens, albeit infrequently.

I recall surname changing for registry filing in Japan being an issue in some other case (I think it was adoption?) where you basically don’t exist until you exist in their registry system, but I honestly can’t recall what I was researching at the time—if I had to guess, probably something to do with immigration? In any case, I did stumble onto this article about growing support to allow for different surnames because I recalled seeing articles a few years ago how more and more Japanese women were “changing their standards for marriage” by not wanting to change their surnames: https://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/news/japanese-public-broadly-supports-legalizing-dual-surname-option-married-couples#:~:text=In%20Japan%2C%20married%20couples%20are,of%20married%20women%20do%20so.

It may not be the LGBTQ+ rallying cry we’d like it to be, but I’m hoping this is a case of legal curb effects.
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Minos_Kurumada



Joined: 04 Nov 2015
Posts: 1014
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2023 11:45 pm Reply with quote
Eh, that's an interesting legal loophole, never would have thought about it.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11366
PostPosted: Mon Oct 16, 2023 4:29 am Reply with quote
Of all adoptions in Japan (~80k a year), somewhere around 90-95% are of adult men. The overwhelming majority of those are for business purposes, when a family owned business either has no sons or has no sons who are willing or deemed capable enough to inherit the business. So they adopt suitable candidates to take over. Suzuki, Toyota, Canon, and Kikkoman are all family companies that have maintained their lineage and wealth via adoption of potential heirs. One company has been doing this for 1300 years.

So I'm happy to see that LGBT people can take advantage of this until their marriage rights are finally recognized. I also hope Japan will fix their adoption system to make it easier to adopt children than it currently is, especially kids in the foster care system.
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