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But who fertilized the egg is not what is being asserted, and outside of hospitals and genetics studies, 'who fertilized the egg' is not equivalent to 'father.' A baby wearing a shirt saying 'I love my two dads' isn't engaging in science denialism, it's just an expression of their relationship with two same-gender parents. Ditto for children of a remarried widower calling their father's new partner 'mom.' Gattsuru has other examples above.
At risk of drawing mod ire for being excessively glib, no, the baby isn't expressing anything because it can't read and didn't pick the shirt. It's being used as an ignorant/unwilling prop and/or billboard for its guardians' views. Just like if someone stuffs a chihuahua in a sweater that says "I love my mommy" they're not actually expressing any of the chihuahua's views - they're using the chihuahua as a prop.
I'm no narc, you can be as pedantic and annoying as you like.
Your babies are just dumb compared to mine.
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In fact it is. The application for citizenship is on the basis of the biological parent who holds Irish citizenship. The mother (woman) isn't an Irish citizen or holding Irish citizenship. The person who fertilised the egg is the one claiming Irish citizenship and requesting it on behalf of the child. Unless we are going to say "words have no meaning at all" which is kinda tricky when we're making legal decisions, the transwoman (gender) is the father (sex) of the child, not its mother.
On what basis have you determined that "father" must refer to sex and not gender?
Reflecting how the word is used in medical, biological and zoological contexts; how the word is used in common parlance; centuries of legal precedent.
Not sure what you mean by this? This certainly isn't how trans people and the people around them, i.e. the people who actually need to make this decision on a regular basis, use the word. Most fathers are cis men, and usage in that context provides no information on this question.
Precedent from times when there was no distinction made between sex and gender is totally meaningless for answering this question.
There are certainly contexts when "father" refers to sex characteristics (e.g. use of the verb father) and certainly contexts when it refers to gender roles (e.g. adoptive parents). You are free to believe that those things cannot and should not be separated. But it's silly to pretend that one of those contexts doesn't exist. Some people think the gender context is more important and can be separated out. That is a coherent view even if you disagree with it.
Is it your opinion that, for all of human history, when people used the word "father", they were only referring to the parent who had a masculine gender identity, irrespective of which reproductive organs that parent had? And that, coincidentally, we use the same word to refer to the male parent in animal husbandry, even though animals (so far as we can tell) have no conception of gender identity?
I mean, this is a pretty radical act of historical revisionism, you must admit.
No I am not claiming that. You are claiming that usage of a word in historical contexts where no distinction was made between sex and gender somehow provides information on whether the word best applies to sex or gender.
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For most people in most of human history, the word "father" refers to individuals of a particular sex, not individuals of a particular gender identity. Therefore, it is the common definition, the definition used in common parlance. The people using it in the nonstandard way you recommend are a minuscule minority, and there are hundreds of millions of living people for whom the question "does the word 'father' refer to the male parent, or the parent with a masculine gender identity?" would simply be incoherent. If you think the standard definition is deficient, you're welcome to argue in favour of your own, but it's rather obnoxious of you to pretend that everyone's already using your definition and that I'm the weird one because I understand the word "father" to mean "the male parent" and not "a parent with a masculine gender identity".
On the contrary, I think it demonstrates just how recent and faddish this worldview is. Only a tiny minority of currently living humans currently believe this is a distinction worth litigating, and dozens if not hundreds of countries manage just fine without.
I find this response confusing.
If you believe this, you do not understand what people mean by gender identity. Gender and sex are two components of what was previously seen as a single concept. It's not a brand new layer built on top of sex, it's taking certain components and calling them "sex", and other components and calling them "gender". As you say:
It would be incoherent because they do not make that distinction.
Certainly. But you are litigating this distinction:
Or @HereAndGone2 above:
To state it plainly, here are two different statements:
#1 is a coherent view that I disagree with, but it seems you hold. #2 is something you are claiming that seems pretty obviously false to me. It's at best ambiguous, and in actual practice it gets used in line with gender in situations where sex and gender do not agree.
#2 is an incoherent statement unless you reject #1, even if only for the sake of argument. Do you believe that, within the frame where we believe that sex and gender are separate concepts worth distinguishing, it makes sense to refer to this woman as a mother? If not, why?
It would be more accurate to say that I believe sex is a real thing, and that "gender" (and "gender identity") is a meaningless and incoherent concept unworthy of discussion. It's not that I think gender is a meaningful idea, but that it's not the place of the courts to debate it: it's that I don't think the courts should be passing comment on a completely meaningless concept in the first place. As a society, we've been collectively talking about this "gender" concept for decades, but I've yet to come across a simple, cogent, concise and non-circular definition of what the word actually means, and what it means to have a "gender identity" of x.
It is a simple scientific fact that every mammal must have a male parent and a female parent. The identity of one's biological parents is of paramount importance in a range of medical and genealogical context.
By contrast, there is no similar requirement that every mammal must have one parent of each gender identity. In recognition of this basic biological fact (and for the sake of consistency with how the word is used when talking about every species other than humans) I think it's more appropriate if, in the context of genealogy, the words "father" and "mother" are used to refer to individuals of a specific sex only.
You might say that the litigant in this case only wants to be referred to as the child's "mother" and would have no objection to being referred to as the child's "male parent". And I think you're attempting to sanewash the trans activist movement. I think this man would object just as strenuously to being described as the child's "male parent" as he would to being described as the child's "father". 100% of the time when a "moderate" trans activist announces that they're not engaging in science denialism and they're just calling on everyone to acknowledge the distinction between sex and gender – within a matter of minutes, a trans person will invariably show up to assert that, no, I really am "female" and it's dehumanising to describe me as "male".
(This is why I find this case corrosive to scientific fact and sense-making. In the case of adoptive parents, an adult simply wishes to be recognised as a child's primary caregiver, while still acknowledging the adults who are the child's biological parents. This is different: the litigant is the child's male biological parent, but wants to be legally recognised as not being the child's male biological parent. His claim is that this child does not have a male biological parent. You can talk about "recognising the distinction between sex and gender" til the cows come home, but I think we both know what he would say if the question was put to him point blank.)
Even in your example of how the words "father" and "mother" are used to refer to adoptive rather than biological parents, I don't really think this has anything to do with your mystical concept of "gender". Rather, the word "father" traditionally had two meanings:
Typically these two entities would be the same person, but we acknowledged various instances in which they would not be, as in the case of adoption. But I think it's blatant historical revisionism to claim that, when we refer to an adoptive parent as a child's father, this is in reference to his performing the "gendered role" of a father or whatever. On the contrary, I would say that referring to an adoptive parent as a "father" would be historically understood to mean "despite the fact that the child is not his biological offspring, this individual serves as this child's primary caregiver, and this individual is of the male sex". "Gender" or "gender roles" or how the man "identifies" simply wouldn't enter into the discussion at all.
So there's a tendency on the left when discussing this topic to refuse to ever say anything that could possibly construed as denying someone's conception of their gender. This is where the stupid circular non-definitions come from. But reversed stupidity is not intelligence, this does not mean there isn't a reasonable point of view in there. I don't think this is "sane washing", I'm not trying to justify or defend this person's conduct or beliefs, I'm trying to determine what policy is reasonable.
Gender is an attempt to decouple the social roles that tend to be associated with particular sexes from the biological reality of those sexes. I would say gender is essentially "everything that tends to be associated with a particular sex but can be decoupled from the biological reality of that sex". Gender identity is "the set of those things that one wishes to have", and a female gender identity means you largely want to have the things that are associated with the female sex. I'm sure many would take issue with these definitions, but I think these definitions accurately describe how people use these words.
So,
#2 is a central example of something that is gender, not sex. Yes, historically it is people with male sexual characteristics who would be referred to as fathers even in adoptions. But the biological sex is completely irrelevant in this case, if someone could successfully pass as the opposite sex, they absolutely would be treated that way.
Yes, because they do not decouple sex from gender. I still don't understand why you think that this gestalt of "sex" and "gender" actually only corresponds to what I would refer to as "sex" and not "gender". This seems tautologically false?
There is not actually this clean linguistic separation between sex and gender in actual usage, regardless of whether we might wish that was true. "Male" and "female" get used to refer to both gender and sex all the time. But this person likely would use "Assigned male at birth" to mean the exact same thing you mean by "Male". You probably think this is obnoxious, because I do too. But you are talking about the same thing.
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"Dad" is not a term of art in law, unlike "father". There is no meaningful legal sense in which this person is this child's mother: he did not gestate the child in his womb for nine months, nor is he a woman who adopted a child with different biological parents. I find it almost impossible to divine any sense in which the assertion "this child's male biological parent is not their father" is not simply a lie. You can say that you're not lying, you're just proposing to change the definitions of words to newer, more "inclusive" definitions. Well, I don't care if an official proclamation from a state body that "the earth is 6,000 thousand years old" is followed by a footnote clarifying that the word "year" is here defined as a unit of time equal to 756,667 rotations around the sun. That might make creationists feel more "included", but it's still a lie.
Legal documents do not exist to validate narcissists' claimed sense of self.
Ireland allows self-ID. Do you think it would be reasonable for a trans woman who adopted a child to be referred to as the child's father, by the state that recognizes them as a woman? Of course not, "mother" is the most reasonable word in this context.
There's no lying here, you just don't agree with self-ID.
Mother is a word that carries a range of connotations, from "gave birth" to "will pour the tea". Like with man/woman, trans rights activists (at least this one) want to cleave off and deny the connotations that don't serve their ends (like gave birth!) while holding tight to those that do serve their ends (has some manner of parental relation to a child) regardless of any broader implications, for as long as they serve their ends, and no longer. It's that simple.
One very narrow implication that shows how the rationale rapidly ceases to serve their ends: The argument only works if fatherhood excludes transwomen, and that's trans erasure.
I think calling a trans woman a mother is basically the same as calling an adoptive woman a mother. I don't think anyone here is saying that adoptive mothers can't call themselves mothers because they didn't e.g. give birth. I don't really see how this situation is any different.
You are phrasing things in a maximally sinister way. But yes, you are being asked to use words in a specific way. You are free not to do so but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me and certainly doesn't feel like an evil plot.
I can't speak for anyone else but I have no issues with the idea that fatherhood excludes trans women in most contexts.
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If the trans woman adopted the child, which was no way related to her at all, go ahead and Call Her Daddy (or Mommy, in this instance).
This is not the case. This is the father of the child trying to get permission to apply as the mother of the child, when the mother of the child is her wife who is not an Irish citizen. Mommy Number Two (and God alone knows how they sort things out in their house as to who is Mom, Mum, or Mam) provided the sperm to knock up Mommy Number One. All the current system wants is that this person applies as, technically, the father (which is what they are: the provider of the male sperm to inseminate the female ovum that created this child in the first place).
Mommy Two doesn't want to do this because it insults her primal womanhood or something.
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Of course I don't agree with self-ID. Did you think I was trying to pretend otherwise?
Even with adoption we acknowledge that we're using the words "mother" and "father" in a nonstandard way, but it's a social convention that these words can respectively refer to "female primary caregiver" and "male primary caregiver" respectively, in addition to their traditional meanings of "female biological parent" and "male biological parent".
What this man is demanding is rather more radical than that. He is not demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent, even if he is not the child's biological parent. He is not even demanding to be recognised as the child's legal parent of a specific gender, while not being the child's biological parent. No – he is the child's male biological parent, and wants that fact struck from public record, because it makes him uncomfortable. He wants it said that this child does not have a biological father, only two biological mothers. Sorry, but no matter how you swing it, this is a lie. It is a lie to say that this child has no biological father. And it is an abuse of the court system that so much public time and resources have been wasted on painstakingly refuting the fantasy of this narcissist, who wants a simple biological fact expunged from public records because it makes him sad.
As an aside, if the prospect of being referred to as the father of your child* makes you so unhappy, maybe you should have considered that before impregnating your female partner. I'd even go so far as to say that a man ostensibly reduced to fits of crying when someone accurately refers to him as the father of his child may not be mentally stable enough to be a functional parent.
*And solely in legal documents: I'm sure everyone in your social circle would be more than happy to indulge your delusions.
This all seems contingent on the idea that "father" must refer to sex, not gender. I don't really see where you are getting that from. Certainly in the nascent world of out trans people, that isn't how it is used.
If you're just arguing against self-ID in general, fine. I've rehashed that enough in the past and am not really interested. But the OP of this thread, and your post, both seem to imply that there is something additionally bad about this situation. And I don't really understand what that is. It seems silly to me to think that the rule would ever be that she is both a "woman" and a "father". Of course if the state is willing to recognize her as a woman it should also recognize her as a mother. That isn't a "lie", everyone involved understands perfectly well that she didn't give birth to the kid and nobody is attempting to claim otherwise.
Because for the purposes of a birth certificate, for purposes of tracing genealogy, for purposes of tracking inheritable disease, for legal purposes, the word "father" refers to the male person who sired a child, not to one (or both) of a child's parents who "identifies as" a man, whatever the fuck it means to "identify as" anything.
From the OP, my impression was that @HereAndGone2 was bemoaning the motte-and-bailey shell game that trans activists have been playing on Western society for years. We were assured that of course trans people aren't literally claiming to be members of the opposite sex: they're just demanding that we recognise the existence of something else called "gender identity" in addition to sex. Cases like these make it abundantly obvious that this was a barefaced lie: that the trans activist movement is fully intent on deconstructing and redefining 100% of sexed nouns in the English language, and that trans-identified males will not rest until they have been officially deemed members of 100% of categories previously considered the sole province of female people. This man's preposterous demand to have himself legally declared a mother is of a piece with any number of grotesque neologisms like "chestfeeding", "pregnant people", "birthing person", "menstruators" and the like.
Correct, it is silly. If this man can get his friends and family to play along with his self-image*, more power to him. I'd even make an effort to refer to him by his preferred name if I met him in person. But in the eyes of the law, he should be considered neither "woman" nor "mother". Because he is neither, he knows he is neither, the actual mother of his child knows he is neither, and no amount of legal documentation will ever persuade any of them or us otherwise.
*Or rather, what he claims his image of himself is: a self-image that needs to be "validated" and "affirmed" at every turn, up to and including within his child's legal documentation, sounds like it has more in common with vulnerable narcissism than a stable self-image.
That, and that I hate being proven right every time I imagine the slope is going to be greased up with the finest lubricant known to humankind, and get told no such a thing ever will happen, and then down the line oh look here we all are skiing downhill on a tea tray at light speed.
True. I don't think it's even remotely appropriate to refer to it as a "fallacy" anymore.
Oh don't worry, we'll still get hit over the head with a condescending "well that's just the X/Y/Z/whatever Fallacy" the next time we're asked as a matter of common civility and human niceness to say that rocks have self-hood and should be entitled to vote in the elections.
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