French City To Replace Mother and Father with ‘Parent 1’ ‘Parent 2’ On Civil Documents

In an effort to become more inclusive and welcoming to LGBT people, the French city of Marseille is moving to scrap mother and father from civil documents and replace the terms with “parent 1” and “parent 2”.

The city of Marseille is moving to update its civil status forms, such as administrative documents and marriage certificates, to become “more inclusive, in coherence with the law” according to deputy mayor Jean-Marc Bonnaffous.

So far the forms have been updated in select boroughs in the city but Marseille is hoping to implement the new changes across the entire city as part of the initiative, the newspaper La Marseillaise reports.

Along with the changes to the forms, around 300 civil registrars are also being trained in LGBT issues, according to deputy mayor Sophie Roques, indicating the registrars will be trained on sexual lifestyles as well as gender identity issues.

Last November, the French Minister Delegate for Citizenship Marlène Schiappa announced that civil status forms would become more inclusive to same-sex couples and that they would no longer automatically list a father and a mother.

“This will indicate when this is the case, that you have two moms or two dads, or that you are two moms and two dads,” Schiappa said.

President of the Association of Homoparental Families Alexandre Urwicz welcomed the change but claimed it had taken eight years for the policy as gay marriage legislation had been passed in France in 2013.

As early as 2019, however, the French parliament voted to remove mother and father from school forms and replace them with “parent 1” and “parent 2”, a move law lecturer Aude Mirkovic described as being unfair to the majority of families.

“But, precisely, parents are not only legal guardians, in the same way as a guardian or a delegate of parental authority. They have the constitutive dimension of indicating to the child his origin, and the measures that reduce them to legal guardians deprive both children and parents of this affiliation,” she said.

France is not the only country in which there have been calls to abandon terms like mother and father in the name of inclusivity. Last April, schools in Melbourne Australia were called on to drop various gendered terms and use neutral terms such as parent instead.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.