Tony Hynes

Tony Hynes works with Adoptions Together, an adoption placement agency, as a Discussion Group Facilitator. Tony is a transracial adoptee, and was adopted by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons in the mid 1990s.  His family faced a custody battle with his birth family, who felt Mary and Janet, two white women, were not the right people to raise him. Tony writes about his experiences growing up as both a transracial adoptee  and as a child growing up in a same sex headed household in his memoir "The Son With Two Moms.." Today, Tony is an advocate for families like his, and serves on the Board of Directors for Rainbow Families, an organization devoted to promoting the rights of LGBTQ Families everywhere.  Tony has done a book reading as part of the Takoma Arts series and at other places.  He also has been invited to be a speaker at several conferences on adoption throughout the nation, especially those involving trans-racial adoptions.  In the fall of 2016 Tony was awarded a full scholarship to begin his PhD studies in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County. (UMBC), where he has begun work on his dissertation, which focuses on racial connectedness among transracial adoptees.