Transgender parents have no entitlement to rewrite their children's truth

“Once upon a time there was a Mummy who became a Daddy!”

Go figure how you would explain the rest of this story to kids.

A woman gives birth to a child, then decides she wants to be a man and then decides that she’d like to be recorded as the child’s father. It would be funny if it wasn’t so ridiculous.

Trans issues are a societal hot potato in our present age, where almost any viewpoint can cause great offence, vicious accusations and bitter debate.

How young is too young to accept a person’s wish to transition? What’s the length of time and degree of modification before it’s right to affirm the person in the gender they seek to be?

It is okay to accept that some questions will always be fiercely contested. Even if you accept that a woman who becomes a man should indeed be regarded as a man, are there any circumstances in which it’s okay not to allow the re-invention of his past to erase elements that could only have existed because he had lived as a biological woman?

This is exactly the moral issue at the heart of the case of trans man Freddy McConnell, who today lost his challenge at the Court of Appeal for the right to be recorded as his child’s “father” or “parent” rather than “mother.”

The 32 year-old Guardian journalist (I know,  shock!) argued that the legal requirement to document the person who gave birth to the child as its mother contravenes his human rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

So whilst this case was ultimately about human rights legislation and not a clash of moral opinions, it does nonetheless raise a significant moral question, since as the judges made clear, any change to the law would be a matter for legislators. Unlike the judiciary, legislators would have to consider the rights of the child.

Are we not all entitled to the truth about who we are and where we came from? McConnell’s child might well find it completely normal that its mother had an operation, became a man and thus is called Father. The contradiction between who McConnell is now and his legally recognised role in that child’s origin is surely one that simply has to be allowed to stand. However messy the situation is, it is nonetheless truthful.

Truth is inconsistent, contradictory and sometimes plain odd. That’s because truth is factual. As a woman, Freddy McConnell gave birth to a child and then underwent surgical gender transition. That is a messy situation.

It may not suit him for this legal registration to reflect events as they happened, since he may regard his own philosophy and sense of identity as a higher truth, however ahistorical. Yet whitewashing the pernickety biological details out of the story is still whitewashing no matter the nobility of the motives or conformance to a politically correct zeitgeist.

Transgender people can, in the main, expect people to accept their gender identity. Attitudes have shifted greatly on this. They can get their gender identity legally changed.

But as Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the High Court’s Family Division has said, there is a “material difference between a person’s gender and their status as a parent.”

I agree with him. Pressure will come for legal changes that would allow Mr McConnell and others like him to register themselves as their children’s father, even if they are in fact the biological mother. This is simply making an impossibility become true, as if by magic. As a society, we have to say no to that.

We have to say that rights stop when they impinge on the rights of others, and transgender parents have no entitlement to rewrite their children’s truth.