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

[MrsSnippyPants]

Haven't seen anything about this and it just popped up on Sky News. Hearing continues tomorrow

Newspaper report here
www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/transgender-man-who-gave-birth-21629478

Barracker. As ever awesome

Gonna print that out an£ put it on my fridge so can be seen then send it to my mp. And msp

Why couldn’t Whittle love as a lesbian?

Massive internalised misogyny and some kind of disassociation and reinvention after a traumatic upbringing, I reckon.

(Courtesy of Du’s pop psychology and reading of everything I can find on female transitioners and trauma and depression/anxiety in adolescents)

And, yet, so many in the world know what women are www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51751915 and so treat them differently to men.

Your most magnificent post, Barracker, of very many.

Massive internalised misogyny and some kind of disassociation and reinvention after a traumatic upbringing, I reckon.

Like many trans people SW appears to have had rigid gendered expectations enforced on him from a young age

It seems unlikely that his father would have been as generous, had he still been alive. He was a representative of the old Britain, the old Manchester. "He was very much of the view that girls were girls and women were women," says Whittle. "I remember being on a holiday when I was about 13 and he hit my mother because she came out of the caravan wearing slacks and refused to change back into a dress."

www.theguardian.com/society/2007/apr/17/socialcare.highereducationprofile

Witness of domestic violence against his mother - there’s your trauma trigger.

vimeo.com/217950594?utm_campaign=2617611&utm_source=affiliate&utm_channel=affiliate&cjevent=cab238245f3011ea803002060a18050e

26 minutes, discussion of how trauma can create a cross sex gender identity.

Still, no excuse for throwing every woman in the country under the bus, and every woman yet to be born too!

This really doesn’t make sense. The child will know Freddy was the one who gave birth to him one way or the other. It’s splashed all over the fucking papers for a start. Even if Freddy could expunge the internet of all mention of Freddy and sprinkle amnesia dust over the world’s population, it would only take the child walking in while Freddy was having a piss, as small children are wont to do, for him to find out the truth.

Presumably the child will be told that daddies can have babies too, but not even that level of gaslighting will prevent the child from knowing the truth, that only females can have babies.

Is Freddy expecting the entire world to have gaslit itself into believing sex doesn’t exist in the time it takes to raise a child old enough to notice biology?

How in the living fuck does Freddy expect Freddy’s sex to remain secret? Either Freddy is suffering from serious delusions or Freddy is genuinely so utterly narcissistic that Freddy doesn’t actually give a shit about whether Freddy’s child knows the truth or not, as long as Freddy gets what Freddy wants.

Freddy knows very well that Freddy is female so I can only conclude it’s the latter.

Brilliant and terrifying Barracker.

And it's all happening.

Really, we should be campaigning for the repeal of the GRA. We don't really need it any more and we can chuck the old stereotypes along with sexualised children's clothing and sexed toys.

That would sort everything out.

I'll never get over it, even when it's repealed, and I'm telling my great grandchildren about the insanity of the early 21st century.

You must be a lot younger and more optimistic than me Barracker

In my old age I'll be passing secret copies of 1984 and The Brave New World to my great grandchildren and whispering "they were meant to be a warning" but the children won't understand.

Thisismytimetoshine - Is there a mechanism whereby the GRC can be declared void by the conditions not being met? What an absolute farce.

DuLANGMondeFOREVER - We were discussing this yesterday on the ‘court’ thread. It appears no mechanism for revoking a or voiding a GRC exists. Which is great for fraudsters, but shit for detransitioners.

There are two routes to changing a GRC under the GRA 2004.

Section 6: Errors

(1) Where a gender recognition certificate has been issued to a person, the person or the Secretary of State may make an application for —
. . .

(c) a corrected certificate, on the ground that the certificate which has been issued contains an error.

(2) If the certificate was issued by a court the application is to be determined by the court but in any other case it is to be determined by a Gender Recognition Panel.

(3) The court or Panel—

(a) must grant the application if satisfied that the ground on which the application is made is correct, and

(b) otherwise must reject it.

(4) If the court or Panel grants the application it must issue a correct, or a corrected, gender recognition certificate to the applicant.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/6

Section 8: Appeals etc.

(5) If an application under section 1(1), 5(2), 5A(2) or 6(1) is granted but the Secretary of State considers that its grant was secured by fraud, the Secretary of State may refer the case to the High Court [family court ] or Court of Session.

(6) On a reference under subsection (5) [or an application under subsection (5A) ] [or an application under subsection (5B)] the court—

(a) must either quash or confirm the decision to grant the application, and

(b) if it quashes it, must revoke the gender recognition certificate issued on the grant of the application and may make any order which it considers appropriate in consequence of, or otherwise in connection with, doing so.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/7/section/8

IANAL so maybe someone who is a lawyer could explain why de-transitioners cannot just apply to the Court or GRC Panel to have the GRC "corrected" as it is now "in error"?

That seems much more appropriate than petitioning the Sec of State, claiming to have acted fraudulently in obtaining a GRC, and then having to perjure themselves in the High Court or Family Court by making the same false claim.

In the case of Freddie McConnell, the Sec of State elected not to seek revocation of the GRC. This is mentioned in the judgement.

Case No: FD18F00035
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
FAMILY DIVISION AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE COURT
Royal Courts of Justice
Date: 25/09/2019

Before:
The Rt. Hon. Sir Andrew McFarlane President of the Family Division ----- Between:
THE QUEEN (on the application of TT) (Claimant)

• and -

THE REGISTRAR GENERAL FOR ENGLAND AND WALES (Defendant)

• and –

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE [1] MINISTER FOR WOMEN AND EQUALITIES [2] SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT [3] YY (A Child) (By his Litigation Friend, CLAIRE BROOKS) [4]

(Interested Parties)
AIRE CENTRE

(my bolding below)

45. The Secretary of State has the right to refer a GR certificate to the High Court or Family Court if he considers that its grant has been secured by ‘fraud’ [GRA 2004, s 8(5)]. At a preliminary hearing, I enquired whether there was to be any challenge to the validity of the GR certificate in the light of the close chronological alignment of the GR certificate application with the Claimant’s IUI treatment. Having taken instructions, Ms Sarah Hannett, on that occasion acting both for the Secretaries of State and for the RG, confirmed that there was to be no such challenge and that the judicial review proceedings would proceed on the basis that the certificate was valid. This position was confirmed by Mr Ben Jaffey QC at the final hearing, although he reserved the right to refer to TT’s behaviour as part of any submissions on proportionality; in the event this, potentially striking, aspect of the factual background was not in fact referred to in submissions. I have therefore ignored it in my analysis of the issues.

www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/TT-and-YY-APPROVED-Substantive-Judgment-McF-23.9.19.pdf

As far as I am aware, the Sec of State did not give any reason for not seeking revocation of the GRC. However, it is likely that it was left "as is" in order to allow the case to go ahead in order to clarify the law.

Child's Birth Certificate

All the arguments by Freddie about the child's birth certificate causing embarrassment or "outing" as trans are complete baloney. Most people in the UK use a "short form" certificate which does not show any details about the parents at all.

"Birth certificates
There are 2 types of birth certificate:
- the short version, which contains only the baby’s details
- the full version, which also contains the parents’ details"

www.gov.uk/register-birth/birth-certificates

I agree with PPs who feel that this whole business is politically motivated.

I also cannot comprehend the depths of depravity that would lead a person to engineer conception in order to then use their child as a political tool, to the detriment of the child.

This needs to be set beside:

• all the bad-faith protests about trans people being "coercively assigned" a gender at birth,
• lobbying for parents to be denied any say in decisions about their children transitioning.

Here there is the exact opposite. A parent:

• seeking to "coercively assign" a falsehood about their child's identity in terms of their parentage.
• seeking to deny their child the right to have an accurate, truthful birth record - not only so the child can understand their own parentage but also for medical reasons, for the child's health.

I honestly find it utterly depraved, to the point that even thinking about it makes me want to vomit!

Barracker. Very powerful and sobering to read that. Very many interesting posts on this thread, I haven’t had time to absorb them all properly yet.

We do need to repeal the GRC because it’s not needed for the purposes it was built for, now that we have same sex marriage/civil partnership and have made other legal changes. It’s normal to repeal anachronistic law if it’s still hanging around causing unintended issues and has served its purpose.

The legal change to allow same sex marriage rightly supported LGB people‘s interests on the basis of their same-sex orientation, and it also implicitly supports all women‘s interests, because of its support of same-sex reality, as it happens. (Turns out sex-based law making can also protect women.. who knew this sex thing was real any more, eh?).

The Goodwin case whose ECHR judgement prompted the UK to write the GRA in 2004 was based on complaints in relation to employment, social security and pensions and Goodwin’s inability to marry.

We’ve sorted out same sex marriage and I understand pensions, and social security and employment discrimination would be covered by the Equalities Act 2010. Yet we retain the GRA now it seems purely for emotional validation, I haven’t seen any other arguments for retaining it but would be interested to hear of them. I am not a a lawyer.

And with the potential legal trump card available of this retention of the GRA, we are (as here in this appeal case) being asked to remake other laws which would undermine protections and recognitions that centre around the reality of biological sex.

As we all know, under patriarchy sex is weaponised via gender, to be used against women, and it also can be used against men who don’t gender-conform, too.

So these are protections that we do still need as women, and/or as same sex attracted people. We also just need them there as human beings, because sexed human bodies and how society deals with them, are a reality for every single human that ever lived, however much we may wish it were otherwise.

To seek to get society to behave as genderism wishes it would do, and as the GRA seems to enable in law, is to ignore structural inequality (wreaked via the regressive stereotyping of gender onto sex). It also ignores the reality of biological differences that exist between men and women, which are perfectly legitimate to recognise where these are relevant. Like with pregnancy and birth.

Very often that deliberate ignoring will result in a detriment to women (and often to their children who are particularly vulnerable growing up in a highly gendered society).

Regarding Whittle’s quotes up thread, as a woman there isn’t a need to use the GRA to become a parent to a child that your same-sex partner has given birth to (which makes her the mother on the BC), whether you are genetically related to the baby via your egg/use of IVF or not.

There is lots of info here (for England and Wales) about all the different ways of getting parental responsibility as the female partner of a woman who has had a baby- not sure what the options were in Whittle’s time but there are various routes now

rightsofwomen.org.uk/get-information/family-law/lesbian-parenting-and-the-law/#How%20to%20obtain%20PR%20for%20your%20wife%20or%20civil%20partner’s%20child

Wow Barracker. Again! Just wow 👏👏👏

Everyone could see the female sex were becoming unspeakable people, unspoken of. You weren't allowed to acknowledge our separate existence from male people. Men committed crimes and society said women did it. You could never escape a man because he could follow you into any public space by identifying as female. People were very, very afraid to tell the truth.

And that's without the stuff about women's bodies being used as commodies for men's sexuality as well as affirmation of their identity. Reading the above post made me go cold. Ever read Katherine Burdekin's 'Swastika Night?' This stuff is really, REALLY frightening.

Barracker

I wonder what would happen irl if there was more sunlight on this case? People may shrug at sports and prisons - but how many would sit up and take note if they were told they couldn't be defined as "mother" anymore?

That poor child, being used as part of a test case to judge whether they should ever have someone they can call their mother. It’s like a bizarre social experiment to no particular purpose, with no thought for the human child at the centre of it all

Yes! Who/what organisation funded the legal action? Anyone know?

how many would sit up and take note if they were told they couldn't be defined as "mother" anymore?

I don't think people realise the impact until they decide they WANT to be able to distinguish themselves from the opposite sex.
We can all still be called female, woman, mother - but the real meaning has shifted and it now relates to a meaningless 'identity'. And where once the usefulness of the name was in distinguishing us from people who are NOT female, NOT woman, NOT mother, now there is no use to the word.

Like signing your name to a contract, and someone secretly changing all the terms and clauses after the fact.
You may only notice at the point at which you try to enforce the original contract you signed up to, and find you can't.

Another analogy I use is that of homes and front door keys.
The way it should work is:
You own a home -> you're entitled to a unique key to it.
Not
You own a key -> you're entitled to any home it fits.
Imagine if an authority grants a stranger permission to have a copy of your front door key cut.
And then the authority changes the law. Such that, where once you, the rightful owner of the house, was entitled to a specific key that let you and your family in and kept others out, now the law says any holder of a key to the house is de facto also a rightful owner.

You can complain that the authority should not have given them the right to copy your key, the right to have an identical key to yours. But they did.

You can argue that holding a key should not confer a right to ownership. That's back to front. But now it does.

You can try to change the locks, but the authority will keep granting the stranger the right to copy your new key.

You can move house, but the authority will grant the stranger permission to your new home too.

When you object that something that once was rightfully yours, has been given away without your consent, you are told you can still live there. It's still 'yours'. You aren't being evicted. You're just being forced to share. With a stranger who isn't part of your family and from whom you have no right to a boundary.

You can argue that every person should indeed have a right to their own home, but not yours. But the authority has created a law that grants people the right to their choice of other people's homes. All they need, is for a copy of the key to be granted.

Would anyone notice a change in such a law at first? People merrily living their lives, believing they own their homes, believing in their right to close the door and keep out those who are not family. The value of a home is as much about who can be kept out, as who has a right to live within. It's about the right to say "this is my family; you are not part of my family". A home that is open to anyone who wants it is no longer a home. It's a public right of way.

You only first notice when a stranger unlocks the door, lets themself in, announces they own your house too, and you discover the authority agrees with them that they do, and you have no right to evict them. They'll follow you into every home you create. It isn't that they want a key, or a home of their own. They want yours. Specifically. And they can have it.

The GRA granted the key "female" to people who are male, and who have their own home already. And it removed the right of women to be able to say 'we are not family', or 'this is not actually your home' to any male with that key.

Really hope there's a thoughtful piece about this from the perspective of the child in the weekend papers.

Barracker you’re an excellent writer

Sprouts yes. Seems a perspective that is very urgent to fully explore- plus the potential impact on other mothers and parents too.

How do countries such as Canada and Denmark deal with this issue? Or is the uk the first country to have such a legal case?

@Barracker your post has been shared on the reddit gender critical forum and has received so much praise.