Woman? Man? Father? Mother? The court conundrum with a child’s future at stake

Feb 16, 2019 by

by Ann Farmer, The Conservative Woman:

O, WHAT a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!

The truth of Sir Walter Scott’s axiom can hardly ever have been borne out more horribly than in a case currently before the the Family Division of the High Court.

‘TT’ was born a woman but was granted a Gender Recognition Certificate under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, making ‘him’ legally a man. Such a certificate requires that the recipient has been living in the ‘acquired gender’ for at least two years, and intends to do so until death. Crucially to this case, however, it does not require gender reassignment surgery or any hormonal treatment to have taken place.

Ten days later the legally male TT obtained artificial insemination treatment, which legally is available only to women under the terms of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, and became pregnant.

After the child was born, ‘TT’ sought to be legally recognised on the birth certificate as the father, not the mother. The Government and the Registrar General, responsible for recording births, deaths and marriages, oppose his claim, which, if successful, would make the child the first in Britain legally not to have a mother.

For the Department of Health, Ben Jaffey QC told the court: ‘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.’

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