Trans-man who gave birth is a Guardian Journalist

[maeb]

Transgender man who gave birth loses high court privacy ruling

Why am I not surprised?

thought you did need the long form birth cert to get a passport. I seem to remember in the dim and distant past getting a copy in order to get mine

You do now due to changes in immigration policy. That wasn't always the case.

the long form was always the requirement in the circumstances involving third country officialdom that my post referred to.

*other country, not third country.

Great posts from Victoria, Merry and Jacky on this, I agree it’s time to scrap the GRC because it doesn’t really serve its purpose in practice and is naively conceived and is being widely ignored in favour of self ID by lots of people anyway. So we need to start again with a national debate without using any euphemisms and tiptoeing about, on how we are going to deal together as a society with this set of issues revolving around identity because they create a clash of rights which affects everyone in society.

"All children should be able to have their legal parents correctly and accurately recorded on their birth certificates"

And yet this person wants to falsify their child's birth certificate by listing themself as the father....?

Not read the whole thread, but surely this is really about surrogacy and setting useful precedents for men.

I wonder who is funding.....

It doesn't feel great reading this thread as a lesbian mum. My child's birth certificate record's her mother and her second parent as my wife and not the details of the anonymous sperm donor. That birth certificate doesn't record her biological/genetic parentage. But it does record her legal parents and importantly her social parents - the women who look after her every day and take responsibility for her upbringing and wellbeing.
Some of the arguments in this thread tend towards the view that this is some sort of a con or a sham. It isn't. It reflects the child's life. The alternative is to go back to the previous position where the non-birth mum had to adopt the child in court proceedings. Who does that help?

And how does it help the child to tell her that she has a dad? We tell her she has two mums, she knows whose tummy she grew in and whose egg she grew from, and that there was a kind sperm donor, a man whose sperm fertilised the egg allowing me to get pregnant at a clinic. In the sense of the dads she sees around her who look after her friends, it's reasonable to tell her she doesn't have a dad. That is the social reality.

Times today:

Trans man who gave birth loses anonymity

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-man-who-gave-birth-loses-fight-for-anonymity-3brkkwt52?shareToken=707d47fa8b6cbdb494aa9cae6cd378ec

I would have preferred anonymity be retained purely for the sake of the child, but the parent had already voluntarily blown that in a Guardian article and the documentary.

MirrorMouse for practical reasons it was never obligatory to name the father. So your case is completely different, as you've named the mother.

Thank you for your comment MirrorMouse. This is the reality for most people around me in my life.

Not also forgetting the couple of close friends who later have found out that the 'father' listed, who was the husband of their mother, was in fact not the biological father...

I can imagine a Guardian editorial meeting.

‘What have we got for this week?’
‘There’s a war on somewhere’
‘Too expensive to travel. Do they have WiFi there?’
‘Someone said something stupid on the Internet’
‘We’ve already that covered on pages 1-34, 36-60, the sporting pages, and in the sudoku. Anything else?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Are you royalty?’
‘No’
‘Where you kidnapped by aliens?’
‘No...’
‘Then it’s not a story.’
‘... but I’ve got a moustache.’

MirrorMouse I am in the same situation as you. The birth certificate is not a biological record. We’ve already broken that link. My children have no father just as this child might have no mother.

Do those of you unhappy about the potential removal of mother feel the same about father being removed?

Juells this is different though as it is not omitting the name of the father. It is removing his existence and instead replacing his section on the birth certificate with the name of the birth mother’s female partner.

In the case of an adopted child, where the Legal Fiction that is the adoptive parents exists, the child always has the right to discover its natural parent[s]

That’s not the case, there’s is no legal fiction . Adopters don’t get a new full birth certificate with their legal parents names.

It doesn't feel great reading this thread as a lesbian mum. My child's birth certificate record's her mother and her second parent as my wife and not the details of the anonymous sperm donor. That birth certificate doesn't record her biological/genetic parentage. But it does record her legal parents and importantly her social parents - the women who look after her every day and take responsibility for her upbringing and wellbeing.

Arguably biological parents should be stated as they are important for all sorts of reasons.

I can see an argument for also having legal parents named but I don't think it should purely be a substitute for.

There seems to be this rather human desire to 'know where we came from' genetically. It's part of the story of how we came to be (see separated and adopted children and the popularity of family history).

However another legal parent is very much part of that history and heritage and should be treated as such. This is a bonus rather than taking aware from parentage or having 'lesser' status.

I wish that this was reflected in documentary papers as its the story of a person's origins and heritage and purely factual rather than a statement of 'ownership' of a child which I feel is how this is going. It shouldn't be viewed as a judgement - it's merely the reality of a chain of events and decisions which led to a child being born.

@JocastaJones It is impossible for a child not to have a mother. A father can be no more than a single cell, but a mother is more than that. Women make children with their body, and birth them. To tell a child nobody performed that function is perverse. And of course, it is an abomination of logic, law, culture and nature.

Alessandra I agree but we’ve already gone there and my children’s birth certificates do already go against ‘logic, culture and nature’. Obviously not law.

Sorry, RedToothbrush, you feel that lesbian mums want to be named on the birth certificate instead of the anonymous sperm donor because of "ownership" issues? You think lesbian mums think they own their kids and don't want anyone else to own them? That is an odd perspective - I don't own my daughter and neither does my wife. But I am legally responsible for her and so is she.

How can you name an anonymous sperm donor on a birth certificate? I don't know his name. My daughter will be able to find out when she is 18 and can find out other information about him before then. Do you want to end anonymous sperm donation? That seems to be the upshot of what you are saying.

mirrormouse

This is about a certificate relating to the history of a child's birth. If birth records are to mean anything they need to be recorded accurately, or as accurately as they can be since as others have pointed out ,paternity is not always cut and dried, or even recorded.

But 'maternity' is a different matter, the person who pushed out the baby is not usually in dispute on a birth certificate. and that is how it should stay . A document of such importance in a person's life should not start off with a lie. [Which is of course why unmarried fathers who want to be recorded on the certificate have to appear in person at the registration]

I have no doubt that the parenting of this child will be fine, he will have a happy time with his dad and will , I am sure , be told appropriately about the circumstances of his birth much as you and your partner have done with your child. What he is told about the sperm donor is not our business, but at the point of his birth the child was delivered from a vagina because that is how births occur. And that is part of his history and should not be tippexed out to satisfy someone else's need.

@JocastaJones
No certificate records the birth mother as the father and no mother, to my knowledge. On top of it, McConnell obviously lied to obtain the GRC.

Juells this is different though as it is not omitting the name of the father. It is removing his existence and instead replacing his section on the birth certificate with the name of the birth mother’s female partner.

But it's not that is it? It's giving the title of father to the female who birthed the child, not the partner. Thus leaving the mother section blank, isn't it?

@AlessandraAsteriti Not yet. But this person is seeking a change in the law.

I agree with you that the child should have ‘mother’ recorded but logically we are getting in a right old mess here. I am glad to have benefitted from the change allowing 2 women to be recorded as parents because it suited my circumstances. I’m not so blinkered that I can’t see the potential pitfalls of this.

Am I right in thinking that applying for a GRC is a paper exercise? I'm sure I've read that the applicant gets all the paperwork together and sends it in and periodically a panel convenes to go through all the pending applications. The applicant doesn't come in to meet them or answer questions. I surmise there is probably a wait of a few weeks or months between making the application and hearing the outcome of the panel hearing. So no reason for the panel to know that the applicant was pregnant or considering getting pregnant.

I'm also now of the view that the GRA should be repealed. Failing that, I can't see how the legal fiction of a GRC can be upheld in the case of a transman who gives birth or a transwoman who impregnates a woman. In both cases that is living as their birth sex, not the opposite, surely.

@JocastaJones
I think it is brilliant that two people of the same sex can be registered as the parents of a child. I think it is awful that the reality of a biological birth is denied. Men do not have babies. Women do.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g These are the requirements for getting a GRC
Determination of applications
(1)In the case of an application under section 1(1)(a), the Panel must grant the application if satisfied that the applicant—
(a)has or has had gender dysphoria,
(b)has lived in the acquired gender throughout the period of two years ending with the date on which the application is made,
(c)intends to continue to live in the acquired gender until death,

McConnell obviously lied, because living in the acquired (male) gender until death excludes obviously getting pregnant.