Freddy McConnell appeal today (Transman who wants to be registered as their child's father) *Title edited by MNHQ*

'Mother' on the birth cert isn't a job description though.

Guardian (which is very invested in the case, Freddy McConnell & the film Seahorse)

(extract)
Representing him, Hannah Markham QC said McFarlane was “wrong to focus on giving birth as the determining issue when deciding parental role” on the birth certificate and that the judge “fell into error in determining the term ‘mother’ not to be a gendered term”.

She said the judge had failed to consider whether the current birth registration system was “fit for purpose”. She argued that giving birth was not the determining issue when deciding the parental role described on an administrative document.

“In society, being a mother is a social construct and for a person who is trying to move away from those gendered terms because of their gender dysphoria, then that is an offence to their right to a private life, an offence to their being and identity,” Markham said.

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She told the court the situation had caused McConnell distress, and the impact on him had not fully been taken into account.

“We are talking about the impact on transgender people of being misgendered and it is the right and responsibility of this court to ensure that this does not continue,” she said. “Parenthood has many hats and what we mustn’t do is tie this up in a gendered way.”

The legal dispute began when McConnell went to register his child’s birth and the registrar insisted he be recorded as “mother”. His journey to parenthood was captured in a feature film, Seahorse. He said he was “saddened” by the decision which he said had “serious implications for non-traditional family structures”. (continues)

"His opposition to being recorded as his child’s mother plunged him into a web of different laws. His intrauterine insemination fertility treatment was governed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, which defines treatments as “assisting women to carry children”, his gender reassignment was under the Gender Recognition Act 2004 and he registered the birth under the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953, which allows for people to tick “father/parent” only where a woman is to be a second female parent."

www.theguardian.com/society/2020/mar/04/transgender-man-appeals-decision-not-to-be-named-father

These are the intended points of legislative change & indication of interested parties.

I don’t know enough about the court process to understand how this even gets to court

Isn’t there a stage beforehand where someone in authority could say no?

I profoundly disagree with this. Mother and father should be ‘sexed’ terms not ‘gendered’ terms, however I’m trying to see a positive outcome if Freddy McConnell wins the appeal.
I think the current parental leave arrangements create inequality and I think fathers should get more in their own right rather than simply using any leave that a mother doesn’t take. The assumption that a mother will be the main caregiver and a father the main breadwinner is a foregone conclusion with the parental leave arrangements as they are. For example a SAHM who gets pregnant will not be entitled to any leave because she isn’t working and Therefore the father is only entitled to his statutory 2 weeks, however, if the situation is reversed, a working mum will still be able to take up to a year off regardless of the employment status of her partner. The current entitlements encourage women to make certain work choices (stay in a job where the enhanced pay is good / closer to childcare facility / flexible hours) and also men (pushing for more pay if you know you’re going to have to plug the shortfall in income when your partner takes time off). As far as I can see, it’s the biggest factor in the earnings gap between men and women. If it is ruled that men can give birth (!), how can they justify unequal leave entitlement? Obviously it won’t help women who have already had children and if more people start identifying out of their sex, it will become increasingly difficult to measure the gap anyway. I genuinely hope the appeal goes the same way as the original ruling, but I’m clutching at straws to find a positive spin.

The inability of a parent to put the best interests of their child above their own is a core part of safeguarding parenting assessments. There is serious cause for concern here. I hope this case is thrown out on its ear.

This ^^

Labels perform the essential function of anchoring laws and rights to distinct, recognisable categories of living, breathing people.
If you untether a distinct category of people, an entire biological sex from their label, and then tie another group to that anchor, you set adrift an entire biological sex from all legal recognition and protection.

Yes
Also, if you untether recognition of the primary relationship between a child & its mother this breaks the most fundamental of Safeguards which protect children when they are at their most vulnerable, as newborn babies.

Well it's the first attempt I've seen of a female parent trying their best to opt into the Disney Dad privilege male parents are so often granted....

The premise of that legal team is that nothing is more important than protecting an individual's feelings and personal choices, and therefore the risk of misgendering trumps all other considerations.

This protection of feelings and personal choices however is not to be extended to the child involved - in fact consideration for the child involved doesn't seem to be on anyone's radar at all - so it's not about protecting 'an individual' it's very specifically about privileging the feelings and choices of a trans individual above all non trans people.

It's also about gaining the right to legally bind and compel the speech, validation and even the documentation of another non-consenting person for personal interests. It's a profoundly selfish, insensitive and dominating act.

The inability of a parent to put the best interests of their child above their own is a core part of safeguarding parenting assessments. There is serious cause for concern here. I hope this case is thrown out on its ear.

Tinsel Yes

Dustin Lance Black has been playing quite a prominent role in UK promoting a more North American framework for surrogacy arrangements in the UK.

UK surrogacy arrangements are under government review.
Significantly, in the UK these are (still?) primarily rooted in laws concerning the rights and protection of the child rather than adults (other than the mother) who want to #create a family.

BBC R4 gave him a 4 or 5 part series a year or so ago.

The case is about the definition/redefinition of 'mother'.

If mother means 'person who gives birth' then Freddy is the mother of the child.

If a court rules that mother means 'person playing a gendered role' and Freddy gains the right to have 'mother' legally handcuffed to 'gendered role-playing' instead, then, all mothers are redefined in one fell swoop as gendered role-players.

Much as female and woman were redefined in 2004 as identities.

The implications are obvious.
All remaining labels for female humans would be untethered from actual female humans and granted to any male humans who meet the newly anointed role-playing definitions. Any female human wishing to avail herself of her legal rights and recognition relating to those labels has to do so on the basis that she agrees she is now a gendered role-player along with all others using that label in the now mixed sex category, and that her biology is entirely insignificant in relation to the label.

And all members of the female sex are legally untethered, adrift from any remaining label that recognises them in the law.

You can be recognised as a gendered role-player alongside members of both sexes in that category.

Or you can be entirely without label, unrecognised by the law.
But there is no longer ANY label anchoring women who give birth to any rights or recognition.

Labels perform the essential function of anchoring laws and rights to distinct, recognisable categories of living, breathing people.
If you untether a distinct category of people, an entire biological sex from their label, and then tie another group to that anchor, you set adrift an entire biological sex from all legal recognition and protection.

That applies to every girl and every woman.
Every last reference to our biological sex is being obliterated in law and replaced with references to 'identity', 'role-playing', 'presentation', 'psyche'.

Female and woman became terms that could and did apply to male people from 2004. They were detached from sex and redefined as terms of 'psyche'.

Mother is legally still tethered to physical sex.

Of course there is a huge battle to untether the remaining label that is evidence that the law recognises female biology.

Dustin Lance Black is Tom Daley's husband (the diver), isn't he?

Great find R0

It's so blindingly obvious where the money and support for this is coming from.

Freddy is a useful idiot for men who want to commodify and commercialise female reproduction and the purchasing of children in the UK without any of their 'brood mares' actually having any rights.

It's quite evil.

This if accepted will have serious impact on the maternity rights of women and discrimination when pregnant. Seems like it has been set up to challenge the law and yes would be interesting as to who is funding this?

Is Freddie trying to repeal or amend the GRA?

''The fact that a person’s gender has become the acquired gender under this Act does not affect the status of the person as the father or mother of a child.''
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/12

Dear God . Freddy needs intensive therapy, first and foremost.
Two females, in a relationship, (and deciding to have a baby into the bargain!) identifying as gay men?
The lesbian erasure thing is blindingly obvious, isn’t it?

The hashtags in this photograph of Freddie McConnell & Dustin Lance Black are significant.
Freddy McConnell identifies as a gay man (its said on a parallel thread that partners are females who also identify as gay men)

Freddy McConnell's concern is for (gay) men's rights:

#seahorse #seahorsedad #gaydad #gaydads #dustinlanceblack #dadlife #surrogacy #pregnancy #rainbowfamily #familycreation #familyplanning #lgbtfamily #toddlers #toddlerlife #fulltimedad #transman #dad #papa #family #raisedbygays #parenting

threads:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3296286-Commercial-surrogacy

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3706683-SURROGACY-CONSULTATION-ENDS-IN-10-DAYS-SOME-SUBMISSIONS-TO-DRAW-ON

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3474712-law-commission-review-of-surrogacy-laws-just-streamlining

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3649812-building-families-through-surrogacy-a-new-law-consultation

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3491073-And-so-it-came-to-pass-Mail-on-Sunday-gay-male-couple-offered-fertility-treatment-including-surrogacy

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3606313-The-Rumplestiltskin-Law

Ireland:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3550686-Surrogacy

The Judge in the first round of action made it quite clear they were having to come to the judgement they made based on precedence, but that they disliked having to do so and thought legal attitudes to this issue were somewhat backward. (That isn't a quotation BTW, it's me reading between the lines, but that was the implicit message I drew).

I've been through fertility treatment and this whole issue is one enormous can of worms. In relation to laws surrounding donor gametes, etc, the definition of a legal mother is the one who has carried and given birth to a child (whether with her own or with donor eggs). There are now strict laws surrounding a child's right to know precisely where these gametes came from, and a complete removal of the rights of would-be donors to remain anonymous. These have been controversial, and also resulted in a reduction of donors, but the precedent of this law is that the rights of the child to know its background and origins trump those of the adults' wants. This is especially the case where those rights would seem to conflict.

We've heard all about McConnell's dysophoria. McConnell's trauma. McConnell's rights. McConnell's psychological distress. There is not one word in the whole of that case which pays any concession to the rights of the child. The only consideration to that end came from the (admittedly reluctant) first court judgement. It's hard to conceive of a situation that would reverse this trend, but TRAs are becoming so virulent and their demands so accepted as a widescale trend, that it would be unsurprising if at some stage children's rights were usurped by this agenda. (After all, they think nothing of stampeding over women's rights: why not children's, too)?

Were this precedent to change as a result of the appeal judgement, its results would be catastrophic and the wellbeing of a good many children would suffer. And I have to question what sort of a parent would consider their baby as a tool for the validation of their 'identity' over and above that child's material wellbeing. Nobody is saying he can't call him 'Daddy'. But a legal declaration of identity is something else again.

Who 'deserves' that validation most? Freddie, or the baby?

BMJ Published 29 October 2018
'Redesigning gender identity services: an opportunity to generate evidence'
authors: Richard Byng, general practitioner and professor in primary care research, Susan Bewley, emeritus professor of obstetrics and women’s health, Damian Clifford, consultant liaison psychiatrist, Margaret McCartney, general practitioner and freelance writer
(extracts)
"A recent feature in The BMJ implied that new services are all that’s needed to improve transgender healthcare. Providing timely, sensitive services for all, including those who decide to not pursue treatment or detransition, is important. But the article did not question the steep rise in referrals of mainly young women or the potential harms of medical overdiagnosis and overtreatment" (continues)

"Regulated medical practitioners should follow a framework of evidence, not simply respond to client expectations. Creating that evidence to inform quality standards is an ethical imperative. We need research to explore the interplays between gender identity, mental health and neurodevelopmental problems, sexual orientation, autogynephilia, and unpalatable gender roles" (continues)

www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k4490

Freddie McConnell & other females who identify as men have constructed the narrative of being 'seahorse fathers'.
'Seahorse fathers' are celebrated as 'pioneers'
Within this is the recognition (acceptance) that they carry & give birth.
The requirement is that society recognise that they are males.

Dysphoria "is a profound state of unease or dissatisfaction. In a psychiatric context, dysphoria may accompany depression, anxiety, or agitation"

Repeal the GRA

Wouldn't carrying a baby round for 9 months and pushing it out of your vagina be more triggering to your "dysphoria" than the word on a birth certificate?

Are caesarian scars and ruptured Fallopian tubes a social construct too?

A genetic, generic example:

A boy presents to hospital repeatedly with bad bruising, a bleed into a joint, for example. The child is accompanied by a parent who is a trans man. The doctors ask “is there any family history of bleeding disorders like haemophilia on the mother’s side?” [haemophilia is inherited from carrier mothers].

How does the trans man parent answer? Do they deny the biological reality of the fact they’ve given their son an X chromosome and pretend the child doesn’t have a mother? Or do they put aside their narcissism to make sure a timely diagnosis of a life threatening disease is made?

Are doctors then expected to say this child inherited haemophilia from their carrier “father”, a hitherto impossibility which makes no genetic sense? At least someone could get a paper published out of it.

In the unfortunate event that Freddie McConnell is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, Freddie will be asked specifically about female relatives who have had breast cancer and/or ovarian cancer.

Freddie McConnell would also be asked about whether any male relatives had been diagnosed with prostate and/or breast cancer.

Whether the ovarian cancer is linked to BRCA & how has implications for best treatment planning.

BRCA:
www.nhs.uk/conditions/predictive-genetic-tests-cancer/

R0wantrees

People really need to pay attention to who is funding, supporting & invested in Freddy McConnell's case to remove the identification of a child's mother on its birth certificate.

& also to consider the wider implications for children & mothers should the appeal be successful.

THIS

The chronology of this is all eye opening. A documentary crew was engaged to follow Freddy BEFORE the GRC and BEFORE the fertility treatment and obviously before the legal challenge to have the word mother redefined from 'person who gave birth' into 'parent who plays some sort of gendered role'?

Is that correct?

It's almost as if someone hatched a plan to find a woman who would be amenable to legally becoming a man and subsequently having a baby, as a 'legal man', purely to challenge the existing parenthood clause (clause 12) in the GRA 2004 that insists that any change of gender status will NOT change parental status because it adversely affects the competing rights of offspring regarding the status of their parentage.

Who has funded this exercise, from beginning to end, I wonder?

It's a classic example of the tension created by the act itself. If you create a legal lie through a law like the GRA, any clauses or exemptions are massive beacons drawing attention to the original lie. There can be no homeostasis. The lie either has to be extrapolated forwards (peerage, sports, refuges, parenthood, prisons, biological recognition - all of these exemptions have to be destroyed because they expose the nature of the lie), or repealed backwards; we shouldn't try to enforce upon society a legal fiction that someone who is male is legally female. Because the lie is constantly exposed by other people's realities.

Double down harder on the lie, or undo the whole thing.
But there can't be homeostasis.
There never will be as long as the GRA allows legal falsification of sex.
We're either going to take the lie further and enforce it harder, or we're going to repeal the entire principle and start again.

That's the thing that makes it all so nuts isn't it? Valiantly fighting against sex while immediately sexing your child.

I expect the next demand will be to remove sex from birth certificates. That way they don't need a GRC later on when they switch.