Trans man loses UK legal battle to register as his child's father. UK supreme court refuses appeal, considers child's right to the truth more important than 'validation'.

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[–]Shesstealthy 28 insightful - 1 fun28 insightful - 0 fun29 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

It's frustrating to me that the acronym LGBT is used here when the only people impacted are trans.

And decoupling birthing from the category mother me very anxious.

[–]MarkTwainiac 26 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 0 fun27 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Decoupling birthing from mothers is the whole point. And you are right to feel anxious about it. It's part of the larger project of undermining women's rights and social, political and health care activism by erasing/muddying sex as a category and making it seem as if pregnancy, birth, abortion, maternity discrimination and the sex pay gap that results from women's outsized role in reproduction are not "women's issues."

Unfortunately, this case and other cases like it impact more people in the LGBT than just the "trans" coz now in the UK, the US and elsewhere there's a new pro-surrogacy "fertility equality" movement with worrying aims.

The "fertility equality" movement says it's a "human right" for gay male couples and single men regardless of sexual orientation to become parents - and as a result such men must be guaranteed legal (and often government or insurance-plan subsidized) access to women's eggs and uteruses/bodies and all the assisted conception techniques such as IUI, IVF, sperm-washing, embryo preservation etc that are customarily available to couples with infertility in which at least one partner is female.

Some of these males are even claiming that their not being able to produce eggs or gestate children should be viewed in the same light as females who cannot conceive and/or sustain a pregnancy coz of issues of female infertility such as absent or non-functioning ovaries, defective eggs, uterine problems or absence, "incompetent."

At the same time, the "fertility equality" movement is backed by some lesbians and lesbian allies who say that lesbian couples and single women regardless of their sexuality all have a human right to (again usually government or private insurance subsidized) donor sperm, long-term sperm banking and preservation, and to all the same assisted-conception treatments and embryo preservation that infertile couples with one female partner can access - even in cases where the lesbian couples or single women are not infertile themselves.

Another issue with the Freddie McConnell case is that it's about parents using their children - and their children's birth certificates, which are matters of government record meant for the benefit of children, not the parents - as "validation tools" to bolster their own fragile psyches and advance their own political interests.

There is a clear conflict in this case between parental rights and children's rights. But as in all such family law cases involving someone who claims to be trans, the trans lobby think the parent should automatically win over the child coz of the parent's trans "identity." Just as in other cases involving, for example, kids who say they are trans and parents who are skeptical, they think the kids should always win coz of their "transness" and the parents should lose coz of their "cis" status too.

The message is clear: trans-identified people must always come first, and must always get their own way coz trans people are more important than anyone else and "trans rights" matter more than anyone else's rights.

[–]zephyranthes 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

lesbian couples and single women regardless of their sexuality all have a human right to (again usually government or private insurance subsidized) donor sperm, long-term sperm banking and preservation, and to all the same assisted-conception treatments and embryo preservation that infertile couples with one female partner can access - even in cases where the lesbian couples or single women are not infertile themselves.

And they do. The problem with gay male couples and single men isn't the financial cost, it's the human cost of slavery, organ trade and human trafficking. Gay couples and single men should be able to adopt. Lesbian couples and single women should be additionally able to get pregnant and give birth. It's terrible that the human trafficking lobby tries to hold lesbian couples' and single women's fertility hostage, and it's terrible that some of them comply.

No one has the right to claim another living person's organs for their survival or happiness. Not a roided chomo. Not an instagram pimp/groomer. Not an unborn child. Not a same-sex couple. Not an infertile opposite-sex couple. Not a single man or woman. Not a national hero. Not even a victim of chomo-promoted child sterilization.

As for transes, they shouldn't even live near schools and children's facilities, nor have any unsupervised contact with children.

[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Just to clarify, there's an effort underfoot nowadays to frame being a gay man, a lesbian woman or a single person of either sex as essentially the same as being infertile due to medical conditions. As a result, some are arguing that lesbian couples and single women who have no medically-caused infertility issues at all should have the same often-subsidized access to IVF and other extreme methods of assisted reproduction that couples get after they've been proven to have medical conditions that result in infertility or fertility problems.

It seems that many young people nowadays - including some lesbians and single women - have become convinced that the old DIY method of self-inserting donor sperm at home using a syringe-type device (aka the "turkey baster method") that lesbians and single women have used for the last 50 years is no longer any good - and that the best/only way to get properly inseminated is to take the sperm to a fertility clinic for procedures such as IUI, sperm washing and IVF.

In fact, some young people are now arguing that by far the best route for lesbians and single women who want to become pregnant is to eschew all simpler methods and go for IVF, the most high-tech route, right from the start. This apparently is coz some/many younger people today have become so enthralled by medical technology, intervention and the methods of artificially-assisted reproduction that male doctors have come up with in recent decades that they disdain the idea of fertilization and conception occurring within a female's body altogether, claiming it's far preferable and "works better" if instead a lab puts eggs and sperm together in a petri dish, grows the fertilized ones into embryos, then a doctor implants the embryos into the woman in an expensive high-tech medical procedure.

BTW, that young people believe this is not a surprise. Seems that the always dodgy assisted-reproduction/fertility industry - and other interested parties like the transhumanism orgs that TIM tech titan Martine Rothblatt and other TRAs are behind - are making concerted efforts to convince young people that insemination is far superior if done by men in lab coats in petri dishes rather than if it happens in women's Fallopian tubes or uteri. It all seems to be part of the larger project of reducing and women's role in conception, pregnancy and childbirth, and recasting "baby-making" as something best done via technology invented by men and lab/medical procedures done by men rather than by the more standard ways it's been done through history.