A transgender woman in the United Kingdom who identifies as a man has lost her legal battle to be identified as “father” of the child to whom she gave birth in 2017.
The 32-year-old woman, known now as Freddy McConnell, was born female but underwent testosterone treatments in 2013 in order to identify as a man, going so far as to travel to the United States to have her breasts surgically reduced. However, while identifying as a man McConnell retained her reproductive organs and gave birth to a son in 2017.
But when she attempted to list herself as her son’s father on the child’s birth certificate, the UK’s General Register Office stepped in, informing McConnell that because she gave birth to the child, UK law required that she be listed as the mother.
McConnell responded by suing the General Register Office, which registers all births and deaths across the UK, charging that the office discriminated against her and blocked her right to make private family decisions.
But on September 25 a UK court ruled against McConnell and her desire to be identified as her child’s father. In the decision, the Right Honorable Sir Andrew McFarlane of the High Court of Justice, Family Division, wrote: “Being a ‘mother,’ whilst hitherto always associated with being female, is the status afforded to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth.”
In rejecting McConnell’s suit, McFarlane noted that in today’s society it is now “medically and legally possible for an individual, whose gender is recognized in law as male, to become pregnant and give birth to their child. Whilst that person’s gender is ‘male,’ their parental status, which derives from their biological role in giving birth, is that of ‘mother.’”
McConnell, who is a journalist with the UK’s Guardian newspaper, lamented the court ruling, telling the Guardian that “I am really worried about what this means not just for me, but other trans people who are parents or who want to become parents.” She complained that the ruling “has serious implications for nontraditional family structures. It upholds the view that only the most traditional forms of family are properly recognized or treated equally. It’s just not fair.”
Earlier this year McConnell was celebrated across the UK through a BBC-produced documentary entitled Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth. And while every major media outlet has bent over backwards to confirm her as a “man,” while discounting her role as the mother of her child, at last one media organ has stepped forward to challenge the chaos. In a recent opinion piece, LifeSiteNews.com noted that it is “not enough for McConnell that the media obediently calls her a ‘him,’ or that an entire documentary was created at the taxpayers’ expense based on the premise that a man gave birth, accepting the idea that someone can, in fact, switch genders. Scientifically speaking, McConnell is a woman, and no amount of external surgery will change the fact that her DNA is female through and through.”
LifeSite went on to observe that “McConnell has every right to claim to be whatever she wishes — but of course, what she actually wants is for the government to legally recognize her as a male. Once this is done, anybody who says otherwise can be persecuted or even prosecuted as discriminatory.”
Added the conservative Christian news site: “This is not about people who identify as LGBT being permitted to live as they wish, regardless of the confusion they inflict upon children in the process. This is about demanding that society at large affirm their views in law, regardless of what their views are actually based on.”
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