Baby could become first person born in England or Wales without a legal mother

flashnazia it is a puzzle, I agree, but I guess it depends on the basis for their ‘dysphoria’. If they really suffer with essentially a form of dysmorphia - what people are thinking of with the ‘born in the wrong body’ feeling and truly believe their body is wrong, and shouldn’t have breasts/ovaries/uterus/vagina, then yes voluntarily going through pregnancy and birth is pretty incompatible with that on a theoretical level.

However if their gender dysphoria - dis-ease with their gender, that is, how others perceive them and treat them, stems from essentially a deeply ingrained internalised misogyny, existing and developing in a society which treats and sees women a certain way, not seeing themselves that way, and rather than coming to the conclusion that society is wrong (smash the patriarchy=radical feminism), coming to the conclusion that they are wrong and need to change their appearance in order to be treated and seen differently....then pregnancy, as a temporary state, and an unavoidable process when submitting to the deep seated biological urge to reproduce, could be an acceptable ‘price’, because they don’t really believe they are actually male, they just want to be seen & treated as male.

TL;DR yes I think it can be more about appearance (and therefore how you are viewed by others).

My issues with this are -

1] It is a legal fiction to ratify this person in law as the legal father, This transgender male carried and gave birth to their child. In the eyes of the law and biology this makes them the legal mother of the child.

2] You can't have it both ways. If someone decides to get pregnant and give birth to their child then that makes them for the term of that act the legal mother. They are making use of their female reproductive system and become the mother of that child. This still applies in the eyes of the law if they are using donor eggs and/or sperm. In essence they have agreed to be known as the child's legal mother. They cannot then turn around and state that they want to be known as the legal father instead... there are different rules and regulations around legal fatherhood and it is not as watertight as legal motherhood... due to the biological reality that it has to be a female with functioning reproductive system who carries a pregnancy to term and gives birth.

flashnazia I wonder this every time I hear something like this.

@superdamdy

Careful not to misquote.

There's a dear.

I don't understand transmen who get pregnant. Surely if you hate your female bits so much and it all feels so wrong why would you use them to their full advantage? Why have top surgery but not get your womb and ovaries taken out? Or is it all about appearances? How can you do the most female of functions and deny that you're female?
I sound judgemental but this stuff is hard to understand!

Thank you somedyke for saying what I was thinking but couldn't express.

Just to get all feminist for a moment . Historically, men went to a lot of trouble to make sure they and no one else were the father of their children. Apart from the odd claims of royal babes in bed pans, the birth of a prince was a public occasion in that it was witnessed. It is the one thing you can be sure of with a birth, who was the one doing it. Fathers, that was always a matter of trust or control. It is, if you like, a prime evolutionary reason in humans and other animals for males controlling access to females. To just ignore that and try and pretend it doesn't matter, about the biggest insult to mothers you can imagine. Plus trying to lie to a child about the one thing they should be sure of seems incredibly selfish and misguided.

This might help: deedpolloffice.com/change-name/law/birth-certificates

It shows actual copies of long form birth and adoption entries, with explanations.

They were arguing re UK law.
Anyways glad to be better informed (although now thinking I should check your info too and not just be so naive to believe anything anyone writes authoritavely online, although you are convincing and have written well!)

They might be from another country.

Thanks for the clarification Jamie. There was a poster on here recently (of the you’re-all-anti-trans variety) talking about the ‘legal fiction’ of them being listed as mother on their child’s birth certificate although they were the adoptive mother (using it as an argument for self ID, somehow). Should have known they were making it all up.

Sorry, xpost.

Abandoned children go on the abandoned children’s register. I believe they do get a birth certificate which records their social worker. If they are later adopted, the adoptive parents are then on the adoption register but not added to the original birth certificate. As adding them would be a lie.

Cwenthryth, adoptive parents are not written on to birth certificates, which are a record of a child’s birth. They are written on to an adoption register as the adoptive parent/parents. A copy of that can then be used for identity in the same way a long form birth certificate is. It is increasing information about a child’s legal situation, not removing it.

Well that's true - up to the point where the original birth certificate was not available to the actual subject of that birth cert - the baby. And that baby generally had no way to find it either.

I am not talking about adoptions now - but in the not so distant past. Where records were hidden and obfuscated so that the aspirational "these adoptive parents are your mum and dad" was the only record the state was interested in making available. And in Ireland (and who knows what went on elsewhere) actual birth certificates were also falsified.

Children are entitled to a simple bare statement of how they came into being - date time place parents. It is hard to get that accurate with a father but not with a mother. Every human being in the history of the world has come out of a woman's womb.

Cwenthryth, adoptive parents are not written on to birth certificates, which are a record of a child’s birth. They are written on to an adoption register as the adoptive parent/parents. A copy of that can then be used for identity in the same way a long form birth certificate is. It is increasing information about a child’s legal situation, not removing it.

But there is no legal adoptive ‘mother.’ There are adoptive parents. Their sex is irrelevant as it is an adoption. The birth mother is on the birth certificate.

Pallisers the state-sponsored lying on birth certificates in the bad old days was done for cultural reasons based on misogynistic, patriarchal religion, which sought to assert its power via the law of the land, making its religious views applicable to everyone whether they believed in it or not.

The TRA movement looks to want to put in a very similar set up.

There seems to be something strange going on with the message / report option.

Read Mumsnet. All the claims that if men were the ones who gave birth we would have better rights. So, here we have a man who has given birth, but that isn't right either. Go figure.

Lol, I think even you know what bollocks this is, don't you Gib?

Also following on from Rowan's post, an AIBU thread:

Well, it’s happened... the trans activists have waded into the 8th amendment issue in Ireland
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/amiibeingunreasonable/3265165-Well-it-s-happened-the-trans-activists-have-waded-into-the-8th-amendment-issue-in-Ireland

In Ireland there are some TRA groups lobbying to ensure inclusive language in new policies and legislation that will be drawn up in response to the referendum result asserting women's right to abortion.

discussed here:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3260503-Trans-Voices-For-Appeal-Complain-About-Together-For-Yes-Campaign

R0wantrees
👏👏👏

Anti-choice people want to dictate to women (but not analogously to men) what women can do with their female bodies.

Anti-choice people also confuse fetuses (still growing inside the woman’s body) with babies (who have already been born and who live independently from the body of their mother) .

^^^That’s an important discussion but it’s not what’s at issue here.

This case is about a born child whose birth mother (ie the biological woman who gave birth to the baby, but who ‘lives as a man’ and is legally recognised for official documentation purposes as ’being a man’.) ... is going to court on the basis of ‘being a man’ for legal purposes, to seek to obscure an important bit of truth from the baby’s personal history and the baby’s official legal identity narrative document. By registering themselves as a father to their child not a mother.

Noone is criticising families where there is no mother, or there are two fathers, or an egg donor or a surrogate were involved in having the baby or bringing it up.

The problem is that the person who gave birth to the baby wants the legal fiction of the GRA to be extended to cover one of the most fundamental narratives of the baby’s life.

The baby is an independent being with their own rights and interests and on that basis a baby’s parent’s GRA arguably should not be able to affect the baby’s documentation.

GRA is about the adult individual’s legal documents, it does not give powers to change their family members’ legal documents.

The priority is the child’s human rights to know their own story, which should take precedent over a parental preference to be known as a man or as a woman.

There is whole history of emotionally damaging children, where their right to personal knowledge of their origins has been blocked because they have been actively or by omission, lied to.

If this case were won by the baby’s parent (I don’t see how it could be, but hypothetically..) then I would assume that would mean that the GRA would have to be changed, ie that outcome would open the GR Act up for any other amendments to be made in Parliament, at the same time that this change is going through to put the GRA in step with this bit of case law.

Read Mumsnet. All the claims that if men were the ones who gave birth we would have better rights. So, here we have a man who has given birth, but that isn't right either. Go figure.