Transman giving birth-Mconnell case in the law section on The Times today

[happydappy2]

If anyone has time to leave a comment? Good place to highlight the problems of issuing GRCs.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/freddy-mcconnell-case-should-trans-men-be-recorded-as-mothers-zbr78pfz8?shareToken=c03a94e5c956f02e964d54f5dc1c15e6

Share token. Looks like there is a bit of a delay in publishing comments, but most are clear that men cant give birth.

I find this line very troubling.

Jeremy Ford at the Cambridge Family Law Practice, which represented the child, adds: “The decision doesn’t match the social reality for the child — all that it knows is that Freddie McConnell is his father. The law is out of step with the social reality for the child.”

Right now the child is a baby and has no concept of mothers and fathers, but he will have one day. Sooner or later he is going to find out McConnell is his not his father but his mother. This cannot be hidden forever. What happens then?

I have an old school friend who is adopted. His parents didn't tell him. He found out when he was 15 and discovered his adoption certificate by chance when looking for something else up the loft of his house. It was devastating for him. He went completely off the rails, drinking, taking drugs, in trouble with the police, left school with no qualifications. It took years for him to rebuild his relationship with his parents.

McConnell's child needs to know the truth and needs to it to be explained gently, from an early age. It is important for his sense of self, as it is for adoptees. How will this work when his mother denies the reality? This is not a specific question of the McConnell household but more generally of trans parents. It is one that no one seems to want to address.

If Freddie is a decent parent, Freddie will be talking to their child about how they were conceived from a very young age so that he will grow up always having known he was donor conceived.

Freddie's legal fiction is an entirely separate issue to the facts of their child's conception.

And let's remember that this is not a secret. Despite Freddie arguing that in the High Court, Freddie has had articles written and is the subject of a documentary. At the school gate, other parents will know who Freddie is.

Jeremy Ford is either unrealistic or is being disingenuous. My money's on the latter.

It bothers e because Jeremy Ford is supposed to be representing the child, and while what you say is true in McConnell's specific case, there will be others where everyone doesn't have the facts to hand.

Thank you for the share token.
I just don’t get this argument from a practical parenting point of view.

Everyone knows that family secrets are corrosive. Gaslighting children (or anyone) isn’t good. It’s not realistic that someone living with and parenting a small child will never be seen naked by that child. Inevitably after a while the penny will drop for the child about physical sex differences.

Will the adult then have a conversation with the child about ‘living as’ a man at that point, or will the discussion go more that ‘some men don’t have penises’?
In which case, you could end up in a very difficult scenario of requiring a child to manage their own cognitive dissonance to protect adult feelings.

In general I can’t think of another area of family life where children can’t straightforwardly find out their origins. Why would we want to go backwards? It seems emotionally very important to be able to identify who is your birth mother via a BC.

We now have open adoption and we now have non anonymous sperm donors in the UK (though it’s not retrospective so some people aren’t going to be able to find out by those rules). It seems very obvious that children won’t do well emotionally if they aren’t able to get straightforward answers to basic personal questions about themselves.

" The McConnell judgment, Wells-Greco says, demonstrates a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the purpose of birth certificates"

there was me thinking they recorded details of births

These proposals would make future episodes of Who Do You Think You Are interesting

If a transman is named as the father on a BC, what happens if they decide to live as a female again which can and does happen. Would they then want the BC changed again to record them as the mother?

If you carried and birthed a child, you are it's mother. It's nothing to do with how you want to identify. It's biology and factual accuracy.

Also thinking about the practicalities in a scenario of this kind, how does an honest and age-appropriate conversation about the sperm donor’s role in the child’s history go, if the father is also the person who gives birth?

I think most people would find it very hard to describe the respective role of the (biologically-male) person who gave the sperm and the (not-biologically-male-but-legally-and-socially male) person who gave the egg and carried and grew the baby in their uterus, except in sexed terms, like ‘man’ and ‘woman’, in their biological meaning.

And if you can get through that without lying or confusing the child, what might the person who has given birth, say when the child inevitably asks, ‘OK Dad, but where is my mum?’

The only way I can see to make explanatory sense of that, would be to say to the child that ‘transmen are men’, that is, asserting that humans can change sex in a literal, physical way, or asserting that humans can be ‘born in the wrong body’. Or otherwise requiring that everyone else has to adjust their language and ideas of what a man or a woman is to include people of the opposite sex in those descriptions.

And the above line of belief, doesn’t seem to allow any room for the healthy conversation that lots of women have with their kids, about how shit gender stereotypes are for everyone of either sex and how basically nobody fits those stereotypes perfectly, and so on.