Men Can Be Mothers in UK, While French Schools Erase Terms ‘Father,’ ‘Mother’

A UK government lawyer has said that “mother” is no longer a gender specific term preserved only for women.

The comments were made during a High Court hearing where a ‘transgender’ man born a woman gave birth to a child and is seeking to be named the father, rendering the baby legally motherless, reports The Telegraph.

Government lawyers earlier in the hearing referenced civil servants who had suggested the parent, referred to as ‘TT’, could be named on the child’s birth certificate as “male mother.”
Ben Jaffey QC, representing government ministers, cited this document and said, “the status of a mother is no longer gender specific.”

“Being a mother is no longer necessarily a gendered term. A man can be and, in this case of TT, is a mother. He has chosen to give birth to and lovingly raise a child,” Mr Jaffey said.

A Home Office source also told the newspaper, “A change in gender does not affect a person’s status as the mother or father of a child.”

The hearing is ongoing, and if the child is determined ‘motherless’ and the parent the ‘father’ or the court agrees with the British civil servants that the parent can be identified as a “male mother” — removing motherhood from the privilege of biological womanhood — it could result in changes to British legislation.

Meanwhile, France’s National Assembly voted on Tuesday to replace ‘mother’ and ‘father’ with “parent 1” and “parent 2” on school paperwork as part of sweeping progressive reforms aimed to make schools more inclusive of “homoparental” families.

The amendment was put forward by MP Valérie Petit who is a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche! (LREM/Republic on the Move) party, Ms Petit explaining the amendment was intended to “anchor in law family diversity and a desire not to deny the existence of homoparental families.”

“We have families who find themselves facing boxes frozen in social and family models which are a little outdated. Today, no one should feel excluded by some backward thinking. For us, this article is a measure of social equality,” said fellow LREM MP Jennifer de Temmerman.

Establishment-right Republican MP Xavier Breton denounced the amendment as “politically correct thinking that does not correspond to reality.”

“When I hear that it is an outdated model, I remind you that today, in unions, marriages, or civil partnerships, more than 95 per cent are male-female couples ,” he said.

The National Assembly also voted this week to may it law that all classrooms must display both the French and European Union flags, with those on the populist-right objecting to the mandatory Brussels flag as “unconstitutional.”