Identity
I Found Out I Was Donor-Conceived with 62 Siblings
Personal Perspective: The discovery that I was donor-conceived helped me uncover my truest self.
Updated March 10, 2026 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
So many of our identities are bequeathed to us: family, culture, nationality, ethnicity. Others we earn and own, like professions, politics, and passions. And some of the identities bestowed on us by others are ones we'd never have chosen for ourselves.
When I was in eighth grade, a girl in my class walked up to me while I was sitting at my desk, stared down at me, and said, "You're funny looking." That comment became part of my identity.
In college, a couple of people told me there was a girl on campus who looked just like me. I was eager to meet her; how funny looking could I be if I had a twin? One day, walking on the street, I saw a girl who looked like me. We were about to pass each other, but we stopped, made eye contact, and then struck up a conversation. She'd been told the same thing, and we realized we'd found each other.
She was pretty.
A small crack emerged in my identity as funny looking.
The girl who called me funny looking in 8th-grade was at our fortieth high school reunion. In a tipsy moment she talked about mean girls in middle school, apparently oblivious that she'd been one. I gently reminded her about what she'd said to me all those years ago. She had no memory of those words that shaped my self-perception, and far too many of my actions, for so long. She was mortified and apologized profusely. But the fact that I felt compelled to say something revealed a truth: Decades later I’d not fully let go of the identity she’d given me.
Almost three years ago, right after I’d held my mother's memorial service, and 38 years after my beloved father passed away, my husband and I were on a hike. He mentioned that his DNA results showed a predisposition to big reactions to bug bites. We'd done 23andMe DNA tests five years earlier on a lark, so when we got home, I decided to look at my results again. This time I noticed a button on the site that read: ‘Find my relatives.’ I clicked it.
Fifteen minutes later, 36 half-siblings showed up.
I had grown up with one brother and not a single first cousin. Who on Earth were these people? Those with photos didn’t look much like me; but then, I didn’t look much like my dad, either. One of these 23andMe siblings described his father as a sperm donor. The only conclusion that made any sense to me was that my father had donated that sperm. That seemed weird, of course, but perhaps my dad knew someone who was struggling to conceive and had wanted to be helpful. I reached out through 23andMe to a few of these siblings to tell them about my amazing dad, their biological father. And then I went to bed.
Early the next morning, I did more searching online, and I discovered that one of my half-siblings already knew who her sperm donor father was, and he wasn't my dad. It hit me like a freight train: My dad wasn’t my biological father. I had been conceived through sperm donation.
That morning was the Murph Challenge—an annual athletic event in which you run a mile, do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, and run another mile. My world may have been upended, but I wasn’t going to miss doing Murph. I don't know if I was running from what I'd just learned or running toward who I was becoming, but I somehow completed Murph in record time.
Afterward there were messages waiting for me from a couple of my new siblings. I quickly got on the phone with two of them. It turns out I didn’t have 36 half-siblings, I had 62. Today that number is 70. There are likely hundreds of us because our biological father donated sperm so prodigiously through medical school and residency. That girl on campus? Perhaps she was my sister.
At the end of one call, a newly-discovered brother said: I have three things to tell you about yourself. One: You’re good at backgammon. Two: You’re good at ping pong. And three: You love puzzles.
These random facts were not just true, they were true in spades. My dad had taught me to play backgammon when I was a little girl, and it didn’t take long before I beat him about 80 percent of the time. I won a backgammon tournament when I was 14, against some players twice my age. In 6th grade I beat an entire class of boys in ping pong. As for puzzles, I regularly climbed out of my crib as a two-year-old to play with my puzzles during nap time, before climbing back in so I wouldn’t get caught.
Unlike some people who experience identity upheavals from discoveries like this, I didn't feel betrayed or angry. Mostly I felt gratitude to my parents for finding a way to bring me into the world at a time when sperm donation came with legal risks, and parents were told to take the secret to their graves. I felt so much compassion for my mother, and I mourned that I hadn't clicked that button years earlier when she was still alive. I wished I could have let her unburden herself of a secret she'd carried for so long and to tell her how thankful I was. And as if greater love for my father were even possible, I felt it that day and every day since. My dad loved me as fully and as deeply as a person can be loved, and I was not his biological child.
Discovering that I was donor-conceived quickly shifted from shock to wonder. I’d always wanted a sister. Now I had 36 and counting. I was excited to talk to and meet my new siblings and to discover what was nature and what was nurture. It was amazing to find out I wasn’t the only Star Trek fan in the family, and that one of my sisters, dressed as an Andorian, was at the same Star Trek convention where I had asked William Shatner to kiss me in front of 5,000 people when I was 15.
But the discovery, fascinating as it was, was also deeply unsettling and called into question my identity. On the one hand, I was the same person I’d always been. On the other hand, the story about where I came from had unraveled. And that raised a deeper question: How much of who we think we are is woven from stories told to us and by us and layered on like garments we eventually mistake for our self?
Every identity I hold dear—being compassionate, being curious, striving to do the most good and least harm to people, animals, and ecosystems, persevering, showing up for the people I care about—all of them stem from the same place: Love. Love of kindness. Love of effort and determination. Love of integrity. Love of connection. Love of nature and animals. Love of wonder and awe. Love of life itself.
Beneath every identity bestowed or chosen, discovered or discarded, I’ve begun to think that who I really am is simply this: A being born to give, receive, and spread love. And I’ve begun to ask myself: What would it mean to embrace this identity, not in a Pollyanna-ish way and not to make all my other identities false, but as the truest truth about myself? I was recently asked what’s on my bucket list, and I suddenly realized that there was nothing on it other than trying to live into this identity of love.
What about you? Beneath everything you've been called and everything you've called yourself, who are you really?
