The Cunning Branding of the "Angry Adoptee"

Many adoptees online have proclaimed themselves to be "Angry Adoptees" and others have claimed to be "Not Angry Adoptees." What is the "angry adoptee"? Why do people use this phrase and why is it different from saying that someone is an adoptee who is angry? Is this a title or an accusation? Something to proclaim or something to denounce?

What is the angry adoptee?

The angry adoptee is a caricature (exaggerated representation of someone/something to a comic or grotesque effect) like a stock character pulled from a theatrical performance. The angry adoptee is supposedly a human who is adopted and is angry! It is not specified in the definition what exactly the adoptee is angry about, just that they are angry. The adoptee might be angry at their adoptive parents, at the adoption, at the birthparents, at themselves, at life, at people telling them they should be grateful to be alive, etc. It is usually used as an insult by non-adopted peoples towards adoptees when the adoptee is showing an emotion other than gratitude, such as sadness, resentment, or anger.

However, all people experience emotions. Non-adopted people are sad, happy, angry, etc. too! But when an adoptee is angry, suddenly they are accused of being an angry adoptee. It becomes a collective label rather than the state of the individual and it erases the individual contributions of their own personal emotions. They become dehumanized and thus able to be ignored.

I can be angry, but I'm not angry because I'm adopted. I can be angry about my adoption and about being taken from my birthparents forcefully, painfully, and unwillingly by law enforcement and communism, but I am angry because I am human. (It would actually be much more concerning if I were not at all upset about human injustices.) The second that anger is placed by a third party into a collective unit, the adoptees as a people and the anger used to describe them, is the second that my own pain becomes invisible. According to the third party, I become just another faded face against a backdrop of other faded faces. I become one with the angry adoptees. Once placed there, it becomes valid for some people to immediately disregard everything I have to say. Ignoring the fact that there are no objective credentials to who counts as an angry adoptee and who has the authority to make such distinctions, the angry adoptee label marks that individual as invisible.

People might say "I hate angry adoptees" or "I'm not like them, I'm NOT an angry adoptee" or "Angry adoptees are the worst!" or "I hope my child doesn't become an angry adoptee."

It is ironic that the label is based upon an emotion, a universal emotion that all healthy humans feel! It becomes inevitable that all humans will at some point in their human existences become angry! Yet, when adoptees are angry, and there is quite a lot to be angry, sad, and depressed about!, they become marked as unimportant, irrelevant, and not valuable.

How funny that adoptees, who must suffer so much from separation with the birthmom must also endure a never ending tightrope walk of acceptance by third parties who are made up of non-adopted peoples. It is not enough to lose the birthmom and the life that could have been? But the acceptance and love so lavishly bestowed upon those "so low" must also be so tentative and fraught with accusations and conditions.

The point I'm trying to make is that emotions are healthy, but bottling them up, creating a penalty for expressing them, and dismissing individuals for the effects of an adoption of which they had no say, is really, really fucked up.

In the end, the "angry adoptee" becomes a very unfair and very unkind player in conversations about very hard, sensitive topics of the heart. People use this label to silence others and make them feel terrible about themselves. People use this label to appear better than others, putting people down on their chase to escape being erased by people who probably don't matter in the first place. It is a way of Othering: separating the good adoptees from the bad adoptees, separating the I from the others.

It isn't kind behavior. It also is very illogical. No human is angry 24/7. No human is never ever ever angry. Holding people to an impossible standard of never feeling an emotion is a trap. You can be angry! You can be happy! You can be sad! You can be glad! You can be so many things! Because you are human.