A London court ruled that a female-to-male transgender man, who gave up hormone therapy in order to conceive a baby, does not have the right to be listed as a father on the child’s birth certificate.
Freddy McConnell, a 34-year-old freelance journalist who writes for the British left-wing newspaper The Guardian, said that he was disappointed with the “conservative” decision by the court but that he planned to take the case to the Supreme Court.
The presiding judge in the case, Lord Burnett, said that under the Gender Recognition Act (GRA), McConnel is required to be registered as the child’s mother adding that a change to the law would have to come from parliament rather than the court.
“From the moment of birth someone must have parental responsibility for a newly-born child, for example, to authorise medical treatment and more generally to become responsible for its care,” Lord Burnett said according to the BBC.
“No-one else has that automatic parental responsibility, including the father,” he added, citing the Children Act of 1989.
In response to the ruling, McConnell said that the laws governing families and gender are “out of date”, adding that: “Any right-thinking person can see the inconsistencies in the law.”
Andrew Spearman, a lawyer at Laytons law firm, decried the ruling saying that it failed to recognise McConnell’s chosen gender “and, importantly, the role he takes in his son’s life as his father”.
“This is the reality his son will grow up knowing and today’s judgment shows how the law has not kept pace,” Spearman continued.
The decision was applauded, however, by feminist activist, Maya Forstater, who wrote: “In this case, the consistency of self-perception had to give way to the consistency that only women give birth, & people who give birth are mothers.”
“Someone who *gives birth* is not just female that day, but on the day they were born w[ith] eggs inside, when they went thru puberty, when they recognised their sexual orientation, every time they ovulated & menstruated, worried about getting pregnant, thru lactation, menopause etc,” Forstater added.
In 2019, Ms Forstater was fired from her job at the Centre for Global Development after writing online that “men cannot change into women“. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that her firing was justified as her gender-critical position “is incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others”.
Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka
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