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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.
"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.
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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