Trans man Freddy McConnell's challenge to be named as father on birth certificate deemed inadmissible by the ECHR

[ItsCoolForCats]

https://www.matrixlaw.co.uk/news/challenge-to-registration-of-transgender-man-as-mother-declared-inadmissible/

Because a birth certificate is recognition of a biological process that involves people's genitals. It's not a certificate for winning first prize in a competition.

Stating facts isn’t hate. Not agreeing with an ideology isn’t phobic. Tying your children up in a lie isn’t loving. Quite the opposite.

You can have your own opinions, you can’t have your own facts.

I have a great life, here on reality island. Join it sometime.

No they wouldn't. They wouldn't pick on anyone for how someone else in their family is. And I'm not sexist in the slightest. I just believe that we should allow people to live their own lives as they see fit. And having a trans parent who loves and takes care of a child is fine. Whether you like it or not, trans people exist. So there will be families where a parent is trans. The nuclear family - mum/dad/kids has not been the only acceptable option for years. Nor is it necessarily the best - single parents, gay parents, trans parents are all parents first and anything else second. Being trans is not a risk to the child in and of itself. So maybe - just leaving people alone who aren't harming anyone is worth thinking about.

I'm sorry, but if you believe the fundamental difference between men and women isn't simply that we are different sexes, but that our minds are different, so different in fact that if a male person thinks "like a woman" then he actually is a woman, and vice versa...

... and if you believe that female people, the half of humanity who have been disempowered, objectified, sexualised, abused, exploited and marginalised all over the world and through most of human history simply because of our bodies are so unimportant that we don't even justify having our own name, let alone legal rights and protections, but a man who wants to take us as a metaphor to express his own sense of self does...

then yes you are sexist.

You might not like that, and I'm sorry about that. But maybe, just being honest about what someone saying they are "trans" is really saying about who they believe men and women are and the limitations they believe have to come along with those labels not just for themselves but for everyone else as well is worth thinking about.

Because being gay is so everyday it's not even worth noticing.

And being gender non-conforming is great - as a Feminist I'm all for smashing those stereotypes.

But believing that if a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman, doesn't think in a gender-conforming way then they must be the actual opposite sex on the inside - well that is just a very sad and sexist way to think, and the sooner people realise that and start challenging it the better.

Yes, this is a child-centred law. Babies are able to recognise their mother’s voice when they are born and will soon be able to recognise her by her scent. They have a strong instinct to stay close to her and modern postnatal care acknowledges the importance of this, e.g. by encouraging skin-to-skin contact.

I cannot think of an any alternative way of presuming parental responsibility which would be as effective at putting the interests of the baby first. The UK already has provision for those rare cases in which a baby must be removed from his/her mother at birth due to serious safeguarding concerns.

It’s not about whether trans identifying people make good parents or not. It is about how honest those parents are about their child’s identity, their role in the child’s birth, and the legal documents and records that certify that child’s identity for probably the rest of its life, and further down the line, of the child’s future children who also have a right to know their genetic and social heritage.

If parents are prepared to lie to their own child about the basic circumstances of their birth then that begs the question why, since a birth certificate is recognised as being for the child’s benefit. Who would benefit from the lie? What would it say about a parent who would be so fundamentally dishonest about their own biology? Whose wellbeing is served by the deception, whose wellbeing is seen as the paramount focus?

Because it affects a child's right to have their actual parents listed properly as a true document. It's about the child's right not to have a falsified document of their identity.

Femphobia and misogyny demands that a person denies the child a true and accurate document of their birth.

I don’t think that argument holds up on its entirety. Birth certificates for adopted children show the adoptive parents rather than the biological parents.

It’s not really a child’s right to have their biological parents on the certificate. Where it has been judged to have been in the child’s interests for it to be so (such as in adoptions) it can be other than accurate in the biological sense - what you might describe as falsified.

However in the case of a trans-identifying mother to falsely record the mother as the father would be in the parent’s interest, but not in the child’s interest.

So it is not permitted.

That is how I understand the UK courts to have reasoned. Along with the public benefit of a “coherent” system of registration.

The desperate force-teaming of trans with gay is absurd, and homophobic as you said. It's not even remotely alike, and they have to know it. But they know they cannot justify trans unless they force team trans with something actually valid. It's deceitful, it's sleight of hand. It's pure desperation.

Because using your female sexed body, organs etc to do the most female thing there is shows an absence of dysphoria. Any female with actual true dysphoria could never, never, ever, ever do that.

Asking people to lie and denying a child a true and accurate birth certificate which denies them their identity, does cause harm.

I disagree. Just because we don't like having some body parts, doesn't mean we can't decide to use them to achieve specific goals, or even enjoy them given the right circumstances.

For example, in the context of my marriage with my ex-husband, I was extremely happy to use my vagina to have sex with him, and to let him have fun with my breasts. And then, it took me three months to get over the shock of being pregnant, but once I did, I enjoyed the presence of my baby.

The UK Supreme Court stated lying to a child that their mother is a father (or VV) is a form of emotional abuse. The court links are above in the website links from the Children of Transitioners website, which has lots of input from different ones about their experience of having a transparent.

Don't feel you have to answer if this is too personal or outing, but how old is your baby now and what is your relationship with them like? Do they know you are their mother?

My big baby is 23 now :) I don't see him much, because he lives abroad with his father (mutual decision, nothing to do with my being trans). I came out as trans a few years after the divorce, and my son's only concern was whether his father and himself would have to transition as well :P I haven't asked that he stop calling me Mum or anything, and I don't police how he talks to/about me. I mean, I'll always be his mother! As much as they were hard times, most of my pregnancy and even my giving birth are precious memories to me.

my son's only concern

I have a lot of respect for you, Seethlaw, but all you can claim is that it is the only concern he has voiced.

That's very true. However, I'm fairly confident it was his only concern at the time, for reasons I'd rather not explain since they concern him rather than me. He may well have developed other concerns since then, though. If so, I hope he either found answers to them on his own, or he will feel confident enough in my love for him to ask me one day.

I remember an independent social worker commenting in a trans case, that leaving aside what the FtM wanted and the importance of respecting her decisions, her children had lost their mother.

This is such a stock phrase for you lot, isn't it? You all think you are so clever with your 'ugh, that's so weird. You TERFS are all obessed with how people pee/what's between their legs' schtick. 😂

The reason so many of us like to talk so much about the genitals a person was born with (along with their reproductive organs and chromosomes) is because they are the very things that make a person a man or a woman. Not withstanding intersex conditions, they simply are. Always have been. Always will be. You and your cult all arriving in the last 10-15 years to lecture us all otherwise does nothing to change that simple fact.

If your egg has left your fallopian tube and made a baby you are its biological mother. If your womb has carried it, you are its mother. If it's come down your birth canal and out of your vagina, you are its mother. If your breasts naturally produce milk as a result of all of the above then you are its mother. Even if you've only done some of those things, with a bit of medical help with some of the others due to fertility issues, or needing a C section or whatever, you are STILL its mother.

Basically, every single baby on the planet since the dawn time needs two things in order to exist. A biological mother and a biological father. You can be one or the other but not both.

This baby HAS a biological father and it's not Freddy. It can't have two. It needs a biological mother. It's simply not possible to exist without one.In this baby's case, that's Freddy. Freddy can call herself Daddy, she can cosplay at Daddy, by all means, let Freddy do her thing. But Freddy doesn't get to lie and and deny basic reality on a legal document. And she shouldn't get to lie to a child about who its biological mother is, or the need for one to exist at all.

It sounds like Freddy wants this child to grow up believing it has NO mother and has NEVER had a mother. That mothers and women are irrelevant and don't need to exist to make a child. Except the reproductive organs Freddy needed to make that child were a woman's organs. A mother's organs. Freddy could not have done it without them. And Freddy could certainly not have been anyone's biological father. So if Freddy wants to acknowledge the biological connection to this child AT ALL, then it has to be as its mother. It simply does.

Freddy wants her child to grow up to believe and accept that it has NO mother, only two fathers both of whom are biologically related to the child. That is not only a lie but an absolute physical and biological and scientific impossibility. It has no place on a legal document and no place in a vulnerable child's mind. They deserve truth, not being used as a pawn in a cult-ish ideological experiment.

And in case you are wondering why I am repeatedly 'misgendering' Freddy, it's because, as I said earlier, Freddy gave up any right to be treated as a man, viewed as a man, referred to as a man, when she used her woman's body to produce a child, after having received a GR certificate declaring her to be a man.

I take it you know how babies are made?

Why is a brief description of the process a problem for you?

And in case you are wondering why I am repeatedly 'misgendering' Freddy, it's because, as I said earlier, Freddy gave up any right to be treated as a man, viewed as a man, referred to as a man, when she used her woman's body to produce a child, after having received a GR certificate declaring her to be a man.

This. It all boils down to this. No ‘man’ would have a baby. Ever.

Yes, literally lost a mother - not ‘oh my birth mother’ or ‘oh my adoptive mother’ but no qualified person they are allowed to refer to as mother at all.

When you see the severe emotional impact on people of learning that they were abandoned or adopted as a baby we can begin to understand the fallout these kids are likely to experience.

It is striking that the trans advocates on these threads can’t even compute a child having rights or emotional needs. Not even a flicker of understanding.

I would have thought that the reproductive organs were pertinent to a discussion about having a baby, given that they are integral to it. Only the internal organs (egg, womb, vagina) were mentioned, those aren't the sexy bits.

freddie said a long time ago that she was considering taking the oldest child out of school and doing part time home schooling because it was hard to manage the school routine. I assume d she meant that other kids had started asking questions or voicing opinions which didn’t fit with the way she wanted her or her family to be viewed or to answer.

if a class mate says “why has your mum got a beard” and you are 6 and think of your mum. As a dad, what is your answer? What do you make for Mother’s Day card? Freddie will be faced with many situations where it is apparent that lots of people still see her as female and she can’t bully or control them all. The solution is to reduce social contact and remove the child from ththe school setting because of your needs, not theirs. I hope abe managed to manage and the child is not isolated