Adoptees Don’t Want to Hear “I Wish I Was Adopted” from Kept People with #KeptPrivilege.

There’s a specific kind of ignorance and privilege wrapped up in the phrase “I wish I was adopted.” When kept (non-adopted) people say this, it is often meant as a joke or a way to express frustration with their family – but to adoptees, it is offensive, dismissive, and deeply invalidating.

Why This Statement Is Harmful

It Romanticizes Adoption While Ignoring Its Trauma

• Adoption is not a fantasy escape from a bad family – it is a legal severance of identity, history, and lineage that many adoptees never recover from.
• Unlike a kept person’s temporary frustration with their parents, adoptees cannot “go back.” Their entire past is erased, rewritten, and often legally sealed.

It Dismisses Adoptee Pain

• When adoptees speak about the challenges of identity loss, family separation, or trauma, they are often told to “move on” or “be grateful.”
• Yet, when a kept person casually says “I wish I was adopted”, it reduces adoptee struggles to a punchline.

It Comes from a Place of Privilege (#KeptPrivilege)

• Kept people have access to their birth certificates, family medical history, and cultural identity.
• Kept people are not expected to perform gratitude for simply existing in their family.
• Kept people do not have to fight legal systems just to know who they are.

What Adoptees Wish You Understood Instead

Instead of saying, “I wish I was adopted,” try understanding that:

• Adoption is not a solution to bad parenting – it’s a system that profits from family separation.
• Adoptees do not get a “better” life – just a different one, often at great emotional cost.
• If you are “kept,” you have privileges that adoptees will never have access to.

Before making a joke about adoption, ask yourself:

Would you actually trade places with an adoptee?

Or do you just like the idea of escaping something temporarily?

You Attack Us for Speaking Out While Marginalizing Us with Hate

Adoptees who challenge the dominant adoption narrative are met with immediate backlash, hostility, and social exclusion. The moment we speak about family separation, identity erasure, coercion, and adoption trauma, we are labelled:

“Angry” – Because we refuse to be grateful for an experience that caused us pain.

“Anti-adoption” – Because we advocate for ethical alternatives like family preservation.

“Unstable” or “damaged” – Because our lived experience doesn’t fit the fairytale narrative society prefers.

Meanwhile, adoption supporters – especially adoptive parents, agencies, and those profiting from adoption – position themselves as the “reasonable” voices while dismissing, silencing, and outright attacking adoptees who refuse compliance.

The Double Standard of Speaking Out

Adoptees are attacked for telling the truth.

• When we talk about adoption trauma, we are told to “stop being negative”.
• When we expose adoption industry corruption, we are told we are “ruining adoption for people who need it.”
• When we demand access to our own birth records, we are treated as if we are “digging up the past”.

Adoption advocates profit from pushing adoption, but adoptees are punished for challenging it.

• Adoption agencies make billions while controlling the narrative.
• Adoptive parents get sympathy, support, and media attention for their “sacrifice.”
• Adoptees get hate, criticism, and isolation for speaking about the cost of adoption.

This is not a coincidence – it is a system designed to silence those who expose its harm.

The Social Marginalization of Adoptees

We are excluded from adoption policy discussions.

• Governments and agencies create adoption laws **without input from the people adoption affects most.
• Adoptive parents, social workers, and legal professionals speak for adoptees, while adoptees themselves are ignored.

We are erased from mainstream conversations about family and identity.

• Adoptee trauma is overshadowed by the adoption industry’s “happy family” narrative.
• Society only celebrates adoptees when they comply with the expectation of gratitude and silence.

We face social criticism for seeking the truth.

• Searching for birth family? “Why can’t you just move on?”
• Questioning adoption? “Not all adoptions are bad.”
• Talking about trauma? “You should be grateful you weren’t aborted.”

This gaslighting is deliberate – it is meant to shame adoptees into submission.

Enough Is Enough.

We will not stop speaking out.

We will not be silenced by hate, criticism, or social exclusion.

We deserve to be heard – on our own terms, without apology.

#AdopteeVoices #AdoptionTrauma #StopSilencingAdoptees #AdopteeRights #TruthOverMyth #AdopteeVoices #AdoptionTrauma #KeptPrivilege #AdoptionIsNotAChoice #ListenToAdoptees