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.’
Mr Jaffey suggested the court should rule against TT’s claim because other transgender men who had given birth ‘happily’ adopted the term ‘mother’. He said: ‘It is not an unusually held view in the transgender community to refer to a transgender man who has given birth . . . as a mother. They recognise the complexity of the situation.’
The court also heard from the AIRE centre, a human rights charity, which became concerned that the rights of the child – known only as YY – could be in breach.
Samantha Broadfoot QC, on behalf of the charity, produced Government papers showing that civil servants suggested the parent could simply be known as a ‘male mother’. She said: ‘That may well work in the hallowed corridors of the Civil Service, but try explaining that to a border force officer at Heathrow Airport. It is utterly incongruous.’
She told the court that YY has a right to have TT registered as his father, adding: ‘The child sees itself, and is presented to the world, as if TT is its dad.
‘But its birth certificate officially presents its dad as its mum. This undermines the child’s individual identity and their moral and social security.’
It seems that the Government is admitting that a ‘sex change’ is no such thing – it does not turn a mother into a father, therefore it cannot turn a woman into a man. However the AIRE legal team believe the answer to this problem, based on a lie that a woman can become a man, is to tell another lie, that a mother who gave birth is actually a father.
Good luck to the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, whose Solomon-like task is to rule on the case. Sir Andrew, who was originally expected to hand down his judgment yesterday, told the court that it would be at least a week before he announced his decision considering the significant legal arguments involved.
He also voiced his concern that TT was able to access fertility treatment legally reserved for women and invited Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, to review fertility laws. He told lawyers representing the Department of Health: ‘It is a matter of concern that . . . the clinic treated TT whilst openly regarding him as a man.’
According to the Telegraph, the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority has chosen not to get involved in the case of TT.
The case highlights the Pandora’s Box that has been opened by dogma surrounding fertility treatment and allowing people to choose their own gender.
Same-sex parenting, now legal, is based on the falsehood that a mother (or father, in other cases) can be dispensed with from the very beginning of a child’s life with no untoward consequences. And the lie underpinning all this is that these lies are required to preserve the child’s best interests, when we all know that being treated as a commodity is in nobody’s best interests.
The idea that someone who strongly identifies as a man would want to give birth to a child throws the whole ‘trans’ ideology into doubt, but it has powerful supporters – the AIRE Centre receives money from Comic Relief and the Council of Europe.
Their ideology is driven by the belief that what makes adults happy must make children happy too, but what any child wants is a father and mother – preferably under the same roof – not a ‘male mother’.
Hopefully Sir Andrew will not be party to this further falsehood but will realise that law, like love, cannot be built on a tangle of lies.
A version of this article has been published on MercatorNet
