A transgender man, Freddy McConnell, who gave birth has lost his appeal court battle to be registered as a father in a case that wrestled with the legal definition of motherhood and transgender rights.
The ruling against McConnell, a 34-year-old freelance journalist who works for the Guardian and who lived as a man for several years before suspending his hormone treatment and becoming pregnant, upholds an earlier high court verdict that motherhood is defined as being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.
A court of appeal panel headed by the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett, effectively came down in favour of the right of a child born to a transgender parent to know the biological reality of its birth, rather than the parent’s right to be recognised on the birth certificate in their legal gender.
McConnell said it was “distressing to be a trans person and have your most fundamental rights overlooked”. But he urged trans rights activists not to despair and said he would apply to the supreme court for permission to take the case to the highest level.
McConnell had appealed against a high court ruling in September 2019 that even though he was considered a man by law and had a gender recognition certificate to prove it, he could not appear on his child’s birth certificate as father. He said this breached the Human Rights Act.
McConnell began medical transition with testosterone therapy in 2013 and in 2014, and underwent a double mastectomy. His passport and NHS records were changed to show he was male. But he retained his female reproductive system. He gave birth in 2018 after suspending his hormone treatment and allowing his menstrual cycle to restart. The process was captured in the documentary film Seahorse, a reference to the fish that reproduce through male pregnancies.
When he went to register the birth, the registrar said he could not say he was his boy’s father, sparking a two-year legal battle.
Shortly before McConnell became pregnant in 2017 he received a gender reassignment certificate making clear he was now considered male. But on Wednesday, Burnett found that “although for most purposes a person must be regarded in law as being of their acquired gender after the certificate has been issued, where an exception applies, they are still to be treated as having their gender at birth”.
Freddy McConnell gave birth in 2018. But although he is a man, officials would only register him as the child’s father.
