"Transgender man, 34, loses legal battle to be named as the father on his child's birth certificate as Supreme Court refuses to hear his case"

Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust

"Gender Inclusive Language in Perinatal Services:
Mission Statement and Rationale"

Check out the External Reviewers. They include

Freddy McConnell - Advocate, trans birthing dad

Freddy paying no attention to the court ruling that Freddy is "mum" not "dad".

www.bsuh.nhs.uk/maternity/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/01/Gender-Inclusive-Language-in-Perinatal-Services-BSUH.pdf

Didn't mean to derail. Just bitter and jealous.

Buffster I blame myself for something completely different to CP, (even though strangely I wouldn't make that association for other people in the same situation) and I understand the frustration and hurt caused by people who seem to take no responsibility.

I just don't know what medication Freddy would have taken.

But yeah, I am obviously going to come at it from a different angle than most people.

The medical conditions that effect pregnancy are usually not a choice though. For example if the mother stops taking the medication her health and therefore the baby's could suffer.
Taking hormones for aesthetic reasons is a choice.
Maybe we don't need to be paragons of virtue but in my mind his attitude signalled early on the baby was secondary to his own desires.
I'd have expected at the very least for him to be recorded as female in NHS records to ensure no oversights.

There is (and this is the same thing being discussed in different situations across several threads, because it's multiple fronts it is happening on) a difference between expecting language to be added to ensure that everyone regardless of identity feels recognised and included:

...and expecting everyone else's language to be erased and changed and their reality adapted for you so that your uninterrupted sense of personal reality can dominate.

One is inclusion. The other is not. And it's always female people who were neither born to and have no identified into the more powerful sex who lose.

I never once had the impression that Freddy, as a trans parent, was feted to be lonely because there seems to be a whole micro-universe in Freddy’s life that revolves around Freddy at the centre.

Also Buffster, I have no doubt that you didn't fail your baby, and I respect the reasons why your take on this might be different to mine.

There is a big discussion to have about the pressure pregnant women are put under and feel, (which you can't 'identify out of), but maybe that is another thread!

TheBuffster

I doubt you actually failed your baby however bad you feel

I don't expect Freddy to be a shining beacon of virtue - goodness knows many women aren't. I just strongly disagree with pretty much all the arguments he makes about legal issues and identity.

We could be called Sperm Provider and Egg Provider instead of Parent 1 and Parent 2.

Am I the only one who thinks the actual pregnancy was selfish?

He'd been taking hormones that were unnatural for a woman, let alone someone trying to conceive. We don't know what effect that could have on a developing fetus.

Women give up alcohol, certain herbs, sports and hot baths to keep their baby safe and sadly still sometimes they're born with a disability or birth defect.
He gambled with his baby and that makes my blood boil.

My son has cp so I know what it feels like to fail your baby. That someone would be so wreckless, even changing their sex in the NHS records to male, this presumably risking missing prenatal care really makes me angry.

Being a human being is a lonely state, at the end of the day, no matter how many people you surround yourself with, and no matter how you identify.

Being a single parent is especially tough - even when you have the practical support of friends and family.

I take your point Brave I don't expect trans people to be lonely by the very nature of them believing they are trans so I agree with Freddy on that. Freddy is a single parent with strong family support so like many other single parents I would expect Freddy not to feel lonely but like many other single parents, might miss having a partner at times. Though Freddy is a single parent very much by choice and design so I think that's very different from say being a single mum who left her partner due to domestic abuse or cheating.

I can't think why trans people would be lonely, from what I can see there is a huge 'community', in person and accessible online, to make friends.

I'm no fan of Freddy's but would let 'brilliant humans' go as just a bit of a turn of phrase. It's that whole mindset of bollocking on about being marginalised and not expecting people to include trans people that stands out. He's a parent so should rightly be welcomed in parents' groups - to be excluded would be a genuine form of the transphobia they're usually so keen to shout out. I doubt most people in his community have the time or inclination to give a stuff about how he lives his life.

Following the NHS Trust story about removing words like mother and breastfeeding, Freddy calls the mothers in Freddy's playgroup (when Freddy's son was a baby) 'humans', though true (and it applies to the babies in the group too) the removal of the distinction serves Freddy and not the mothers in the photo shared (which I didn't attach).

Maybe the women don't mind but their births and breastfeeding should be about them and this pretence of it only affecting a small number of people when it takes away from ALL women is really starting to annoy me.

Agree it seems so risky OHJ in so many ways for the child and their mum/s.

Yes Chatty they are basically fathers not donors, but they don't need to be named on BCs by the mothers so don't have shared parental responsibility or legal rights and will only be contacted by the mother if she wants maintenance payments or if the child is told and wants to seek him out at a later date. There is no way of managing how many children are born this way. They could even end up at school together and not know, if the man stays in the same area.

I wonder if a man who becomes a father through an internet sperm donation scenario has ever claimed parental rights to a child born? I doubt it, if they are like that Simon Wilson these men want to spread it about with no consequences and only appear to want some kind of notoriety through media coverage like the link I shared

OR

They don't want to be involved and are fairly insignificant in the child's life. They are not the ones who are arguing to be named as the father on the BC. I guess they make an agreement with the mother not to be named.

I don't know how common it is but it has become more common through Facebook and websites like Pollen Tree. The HFEA has no dealing or influence on this and in a way it's no different from before clinics were created where a woman is pregnant and the dad is just absent.

To me it's different from deliberately creating a child who is lied to about their origins/genetics.

Blokes in the internet offering to get women pregnant aren’t ‘donors’ in any recognised legal sense though.
The law only recognises donation in this country as happening in a proper fertility clinic after all the consent forms to be a donor (or accept a donation) have been signed.

I don't pretend to understand what goes on inside the head of a person like this 'parent'. What I do know is that they are setting that poor baby up for a life of hell and deliberately depriving it of a mother. What sort of person deliberately does that?

I so see your point Reality, I do and many over time haven't known who their father is. To be honest I have less of a problem with a person not knowing their father if he's an arsehole, a rapist or a dead-beat dad or even a sperm donor (if he did it the proper way and all the necessary health and STD screening was done) and slightly more of a problem with not knowing your egg donor genetic mother and an even bigger problem with not knowing your biological, birth, surrogate mother. But our biology does count for something and I do think that a child has a right (under the Convention on the rights of the Child) to know where they came from (under identity). That includes fathers as they are half of their DNA.

Freddy's case is about removing status as mother. For obvious reasons everyone knows who the mother is and it's an important relationship in someone's life, even if their mother is shit, even if she died and you didn't get to know her, even if she abandoned you. It's just important facts that we build upon and process and it's part of who we are.

Fathers have a different role and can easily be absent from conception but the mother can't really get away from the pregnancy (if it continues) and the bind that forms in that time isn't something I want to see labelled differently.

I'm thinking more about this and I'm wondering if there is any way or any reason to change it, but I do agree that fathers could use their 'position' on the BC to control women and their children and I hate that this is possible simply because they got a woman pregnant.

Should the status of a BC change to be a record rather than automatic responsibility or should family courts do more? Should the mother get automatic parental responsibility but the father has to apply for it? No. I don't believe that. It's good to explore this but I don't have the answers.

I just think that if we force women to name fathers on birth certificates, it takes away control from women because if you’re a parent, surely there’s the argument that your kid should not only know who you are but also know you? And it also allows these men control over the child’s upbringing, as they will have equal parental responsibility for the kid too. I think it would be absolutely terrible for women.

Throughout time, many people have been brought up without knowledge of their full paternal genetic background and I think it’s just something we have to live with. We have a system now where kids can find out details about donors in many cases (and I believe many choose not to do so). Yes, there will be cases where maybe they don’t have their full background but I don’t see it as a giant human rights violation that completely overrides all other considerations.

Unless you’re going to do genetic testing on every single newborn, there are only two absolute certainties involved in a birth:

1 That a child was born on a particular day in a particular place
2 That a woman gave birth to that child

Beyond that, you don’t know for sure who else was involved. And if you require it to be proven, there will be some unpleasant consequences.

British man Simon Wilson sells sperm and wants to 'crack' 1,000 babies.

From 2016 so after the law change for anonymity, though he's clearly not bother about that by going to the papers. Note there are no legal consequences, no arrests and I doubt the HFEA are following him around frantically trying to record where his children are so to write to down on the national register.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3397175/Britain-s-prolific-sperm-donor-fathers-800-children-selling-magic-potion-Facebook-50-pot.html