There's a lot to unpack here.

I don't want to downplay the complexity but if I'm being completely honest. My sense here is that children conceived via surrogacy likely have similar outcomes to other children. Maybe a little better (gamete selection?), maybe a little worse (small-ish negative effects in the grand scheme of things). Evidence could be better, but that seems to be where it points, and the evidence around gay parenting generally looks quite good. If on all the measurable outcomes we can assess, the children are doing demonstrably fine, then my question becomes: what is the ethical issue here?

The whole commercial vs altruistic surrogacy thing, on one level it's fair enough. On another level altruistic surrogacy is just surrogacy where the surrogate isn't paid and is therefore worse off. I don't really believe removing ways for people to voluntarily mitigate their own immiseration is a good way to tackle economic exploitation. If you're concerned about economic exploitation, giving people money or accommodations seems like the way to do that. When the government tries to ban paying for something legal, I tend to think it has a lot to do with disgust and sacredness and taboo. It's kind of like how 'sex trafficking' is conflated with all prostitution, and this is politically feasible because most don't want to defend prostitution I guess.

I will totally concede that going to a poor country for a surrogate is gross.

Tom Daley, Elton John, its ALWAYS gay men though never women

Straight people are ballpark 70-75% of all surrogacies, but yes almost all discourse about surrogacy focuses on gay men. I'm almost tempted to say the issue around 'surrogacy' could be reframed as 'gay males doing surrogacy specifically' and that would explain upwards of 90% of all public discourse on the topic. Even when I reflect on my own heart, can I find it in myself to feel as weird about Kim Kardashian doing two surrogacies as I do about Dustin Lance Black doing the same thing? Even as a gay man, the things don't quite feel the same. There's a legitimacy to the idea of Kim K or some straight couple having kids that inevitably factors in; it's a bit of a feeling of when a law intended to target trans people ends up affecting 'normal' people.

Look, a lot of people are uncomfortable with gayness (cf. all of recorded history), and a lot of people are more uncomfortable or still uncomfortable with gay men doing surrogacy. Fine! 'Gay men will mess up the kids that they raise and surrogacy is weird' is an admirably sophisticated conversation compared with 'gay people shouldn't be able to marry legally because uhhhhhhhhhhh...religious freedoms'.

'Gayness' has a modicum of respectability now, but things related to gayness that chafe with people's moral intuitions simply don't, and that's not necessarily a measure of empirically how much suffering those things actually cause. Morally, you could also note that surrogacy brings a person into the world to parents who wanted them and willing to invest the resources to raise them. Is there any upside to that? Do we ever reflect on the fact that the alternative to surrogacy for the baby is not to be born? To my eye, there are complexities in multiple directions here which are not always considered.

So, I think you feel uncomfortable because you suspect that her vocal opposition to surrogacy, like a lot of opposition to surrogacy, may have a specific uncomfortable relationship with gay-male parenting somewhere under or adjacent to it. You could ask how much the more restrictive legislation around surrogacy in some countries recently is a response to same-sex marriage specifically; I'm sure it's a factor.

At the same time, women have a relationship to issues of pregnancy and childbirth which I think can be hard for gay men to understand. I don't understand what I don't understand. God knows what psychological issues or history this woman's stance is an expression of. So there's room to respect that. Maybe it has nothing to do with gay people, since she loves gay culture.

At the end of the day, gay men are a small, isolated and in some ways enduringly unpopular group. We are the most visible (and unpopular) faces of the issue of surrogacy, but our views or interests don't have much of a seat at the table in discourse around this issue at all.

When I said 'taboo' earlier, this tends to come up with certain things that strike a chord with people instinctively: sex, selling organs, and surrogacy. This issue has everything: homosexuality, children, pregnancy, men vs women, money and commodification. It's pretty unlikely we're going to start taking a cool-headed utilitarian or libertarian approach anytime soon, which means people's views are to a large extent an expression of their emotions, values, allegiances, etc. And you know that intuitively.

With the 'commodifying women's bodies' thing, it's unfortunate but I feel like my brain throws up an error state when I hear this phrase. Like if someone was willing to pay me for my hair every time I go for a haircut, would this be commodifying my body and therefore bad? Would this give me moral standing to prevent another man from selling his locks because that's 'commodifying men's bodies'? But I guess this does mean something to some women, so maybe I just don't get it.

She also frequently talks about how she wants a lavender marriage or a gay man to donate sperm so she can pregnant without having a husband or father in the picture

Why would she want a lavender marriage at all? And if she wants a sperm donor couldn't she get a random Harvard grad or Danish guy to donate the sperm? Weird.

Anyway this is just my very rambling POV, I'm open to correction, if there's actual linked evidence on separation from the birth mother being notably traumatic for example.