Progressives always push things too far and then act shocked, shocked, when their political opponents react vigorously – and go too far as well. Don’t like schools banning LBGT books? Maybe don’t insist on making kids in grade 6 read gay porn. Don’t like absolute bans on medically transitioning youths – maybe don’t bully every medical practitioner who doesn’t get on board with your agenda. I am sorry that lesbian moms can’t get on certificates – but this a pushback against the excesses of the entire LGBT+ movement – and you absolutely deserve that pushback.

The episode in question featured the Right’s worst nightmare: co-parenting lesbian polar bears.
Surely they were bi polar bears.

Sorry Kathleen. You are wrong. A woman who has a baby by a man (which is the only way that she can, by whatever means ) and then lives with another woman is in exactly the same situation as a woman who has a baby with one man and then lives with another. Step parents of either sex can adopt children but must not be on birth certificates.
A birth certificate is a legal document that relates to the child, and to the adult that he or she will become. It is nothing to do with the parents, actual or pretend. Everyone has the right to know who their biological parents are and have them named on their birth certificate. To pretend that someone is a parent when they are not is a lie, regardless of sex.
I agree with everything you say on the ‘gender’ nonsense (though I don’t think you go far enough) but you are undermining your argument with this one. Mammals cannot change sex and two mammals of the same sex cannot reproduce. Children are themselves, not the possessions of others, and the legal documents that they carry through life must reflect that.

Interesting points but I still don’t see why, ideally, anyone should be named on the birth certificate who is not a biological parent. That is different to having parental rights.

However technology, as so often nowadays, causes issues eg egg donation meaning potentially 2 mothers and a father. Expect there are other scenarios as well so birth certificates need more fields to make clear the biological parents and maybe an optional second parental rights certificate to show those with parental rights but that would need verification to ensure accuracy. . We also have to accept or work out how to deal with the ‘fact’ that 20% or so of children don’t have the biological father they are ‘supposed’ to.

Personally I think homosexual couples should be honest enough to accept their reality and adopt, not ‘cheat’, if they want children.

It’s articles like this that remind me that radical feminists are not my friend and have been engaging in the subversion of societal norms just as much as their trans counterparts. Despite the author’s vainglorious attempt to recruit me to her argument, it is not socially conservative to try and alter material reality by changing a legal document to reflect a lesbian’s wishful thinking. It’s a birth certificate, not a parent certificate.

No mention is made here of the egregiously sexist reality that unmarried men are blocked from being put on birth certificates for their own children without the mother’s consent. Deal with that, an issue that impacts at least tens of thousands of men a year, before venturing to help a few hundred elite women who want the fruits of ‘heteronormativity’ without the costs.

My only quibble about an otherwise fine article is that the birth certificate is primarily aimed at providing the child with his or her first legal proof of identity. Whether or not a name is included beyond the mother’s is a secondary issue.

“Progressives have often steered clear of such points because they fear that a slippery slope is invited towards the conclusion that gay people shouldn’t have children at all”
Well, not so much shouldn’t as couldn’t. Not unless someone plays away from home.
I hold that a biological link between parent and offspring is pretty important. There is four hundred million years of evolution behind that link: The whole point of reproduction is to preserve your genes.
By all means adopt a child and so make a public, and hopefully a binding, declaration of your commitment to it, but don’t pretend to be something that you are not. We live in an age of self-delusion.

Kathleen is the first person I’ve read to actually raise the issue and context of children and their well-being from a rational perspective, particularly from a LGBTQI + perspective. I don’t have any qualms about gay marriage but I find the raising of children the grey area that no-one really talks about. Particuarly the facts known about children and what they need and require to be raised as healthy adults. That DOES include both sexes. I applaude gay marriage but have very nuanced issues around what is happening to the truth and reality of biological conception. This is a truth that cannot be denied no matter how you identify. Nuance requires nuance and careful thinking through. I agree with the author below about seperating biological parent on the birth certificate and parental rights to partner.
I knew and worked with several people who were adopted for instance, and most, but not all, eventually wanted to know where they come from. This was to help with identity. The truth in their biological make-up. A couple also wanted to know for medical hereditary reasons also.

I think it used to be called ‘the art’ of painting oneself into a corner. Maybe the modern, ‘progressive’ version is of a painter (all, nose rings and neon coloured hair) back to the wall, surrounded by a freshly painted rainbow, a prison, and possibly hell, of their own making.

“My lack of contribution in that respect is made clear by my categorisation as “parent”, while my partner is named, accurately, as “mother”.
This is the most important thing, since mother, defined as the person who gestated and gave birth to the child is the only person who gets automatic PR (parental responsibility), the foundational safeguard of a newborn baby. The Freddie McConnell judgement cemented this.
What *all* sides in this serious conversation need to remember is that birth certificates are a right of the child and not tools to validate the identities of the various adults who may be emotionally involved with that child.
A birth certificate is the document conferring personhood and citizenship on a child. Not something adults use to make status or identity claims about themselves. They must be accurate.

Kathleen Stock has an annoying habit of persuading me to viewpoints I probably wouldn’t have expected.

Honest question: what happens when you marry someone who already has a child, do you automatically become the “parent” or do you appear on the birth certificate? What are your rights and responsibilities?
And if instead you just cohabit, what happens?

Btw, if I correctly remember, the naming of the lesbian parent in Italy was always illegal, buy some municipality decided to allow them anyway, that’s why there are so few – and why, for good or evil, such a decision offers clarity (we have seen here in the UK what happens when the government let’s things run amok).

“Relatedly, the gay male use of surrogates is an ethical minefield. It requires an open discussion without kneejerk accusations of bigotry.” Kathleen, your egoistic self-interest is showing.

Kathleen, I do enjoy your work. But do not try and tell us all you have not also noticed the same minefield-esque ethical ramifications involved in male sperm donation. The issues may be slightly different, but none-the-less, they are not trivial. Discussions around adoption and surrogacy with regards to LGBT issues usually boil down to parental rights versus the view of wider society. But why does no one ever consider the children themselves? Children have a right to be born into the world with the possibility of knowing their father as their father, and mother as their mother. Not some hodgepodge concoction in order to make the parents feel better at the expense of the child.

If an LGBT parent is so desperate to have children, they should adopt. No one is entitled to have children, not even heterosexual couples. Nature has endowed us as sexed beings, as you well know. If people who bump uglies cannot produce children, regardless of the particular configuration of the couple, then nature is telling them (and by extension us) something about that configuration. People often completely avoid these questions because they tell us an uncomfortable truth; some people aren’t meant to have children, and that’s ok. There are a multitude of ways hetero or homosexual people can contribute to society, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the children who are brought into the world. They are the only party in the discussion with no choices, and often no voice to represent their interests.

If there is a wedge here, it started with infertile men being registered as parents of children they did not conceive.

I would have thought it started earlier, with cuckolded “dads”.

I do think a birth certificate ought to provide information to the child, and potentially other authorities, on the biological parents. This isn’t to disparage people who are in the parental role but who aren’ biologically related, but to provide a personal history for the child. It isn’t just a case of knowing their genealogy either, but for medical reasons as well such as being able to potentially trace a predisposition to certain conditions.
I don’t see why a birth certificate cannot list biological parents and then have a space or column for legal guardians. If it is a sperm donor or there is some doubt, that could be noted too.
There is no guarantee your biological parents or current legal guardians will be around after the baby has been registered, but the information gained from knowing the biological parents could be useful at any point during the child’s lifetime and potentially grandchildren’s as well.

Stock writes very well and always sounds reasonable For once, though, I don’t agree with her–and do agree with the many commenters who argue cogently that birth certificates exist primarily to serve the needs of children, not their parents. Adults can find other ways to assert their legal claims such as marriage licenses or parental certificates. This is surely not “rocket science” for lawyers.
Moreover, Stock misunderstands at least some of her adversaries. She writes that the “conservative case, meanwhile, focused on sexual difference as the essential basis of a Christian marriage, specifically for the purposes of bringing up children.” It might well be that most opponents of gay marriage argue from a Christian (or some other religious) point of view, but the underlying basis for the argument–that men and women have complementary functions within family life–is by no means sectarian or even religious at all. On the contrary, it’s among the most obviously universal features of human existence. Every child needs at least one father and at least one mother on an enduring basis (to state my case in a way that allows for cross-cultural variation). And being a gay adult gives me no excuse to ignore a fundamental need of all children. I’ve explained elsewhere my reason for identifying and prioritizing this need. It should be self-evident, but it isn’t these days, so I’ll repeat myself here for the sake of clarity.
Parents do not merely serve the physical and material needs of children. Nor, however, are they merely the mediators of cultural information. Even if I were to argue that children must all learn one specific culturally assigned “gender role” and perform it correctly—and I don’t argue that—I still wouldn’t argue that only fathers could teach that script to their sons and only mothers to their daughters. It’s probably easier for fathers to “perform” a standard version of masculinity and mothers to “perform” a standard version of femininity, instead of the reverse, but I’m not referring to that theatrical paradigm. Rather, I’m referring to the distinctive relational messages that fathers and mothers offer their children.
In the case of mothers, their most basic psychological function within family life has always boiled down, ultimately, to providing children with unconditional love. Not all mothers are equally effective in communicating and evoking that bond, it’s true, but all mothers are equipped by nature with the ability to feed infants and, at least to some extent (assuming cultural encouragement), with the willingness to interact emotionally with them. In effect, mothers tell their young children (both sons and daughters), “I’ll always love you, no matter what becomes of you.” This is one of two sources of self-confidence, which is necessary for children to become mature adults.
In the case of fathers, their most basic function within family life has always boiled down to providing their children with earned respect, the other source of self-confidence. This function does not begin immediately for fathers, when their children are newborns or toddlers. It begins gradually and later, when they prepare to leave home and enter the larger community. In effect, fathers tell their somewhat older children (both sons and daughters),”I’ll respect you if you learn to live honorably and effectively in our community.” This has nothing to do with emotion, although it doesn’t preclude emotional attachment. Fathers can, and usually do, love their children. But love, per se, is not their most important contribution. Moreover, it doesn’t necessarily produce emotional gratification for fathers, at least not until their children are mature. In this way, fathers and mothers do not have the same function and are therefore not interchangeable.
It’s true, in theory, that mothers and fathers could switch functions, with mothers providing earned respect and fathers providing unconditional love. But that could present at least two serious problems that few experts or activists are willing to consider. First, I doubt that many mothers are ready even now to distance themselves enough from their children to command earned respect—not even if they are the ones, not the fathers, who work beyond the home. Maybe cultural intervention or training would eventually prepare them to do so, maybe not. The results of current experiments in social engineering, such as abandoning any gender system at all, are not yet in–and these experiments tend to have unforeseen results. Second, especially for single parents, I doubt that either mothers or fathers would help children in this fundamental way by giving them double messages. Coming from the same parent, after all, unconditional love conflicts with earned respect.
And even if children cannot always know their fathers in person (due to death, say, or abandonment), they still need–and almost always want–to know their unique lineage. Deliberately denying them that knowledge by redesigning birth certificates to suit the needs of adults (even if a side-effect might be to stabilize families) makes no moral sense.

As someone who’s married to an adopted woman, and seeing the official b/s she had to endure to contact her biological Mum, my sympathies are always on the side of the child, not the self-centred parents. Kids have a right to know who their biological parents are. For that reason, by all means have non-biological carers listed as parents, but for heaven’s sake let’s not erase the biological mother, or father. Let’s centre the kids in this debate, and focus less on the vanities of adults.  

Ms. Stock, I bet you know the Latin names of all the rhetorical tricks you just used. You’re maybe the smartest person I read. Go back over this essay with your usual intellectual rigor. Leave the mortis to others.

“A society that could mention these things easily could also offer more support for those that require it.“
Society could – but society could also suggest that it’s not its job to support people when they have made a conscious choice (which is different to supporting, say, a divorced mother or a widowed father).

Why bother being lesbian or gay if all you want to do is get married and have kids?

A typically thought provoking article from Prof. Stock. By the end of it I wasn’t disagreeing with her as much as I expected to at the start. Nevertheless, “won’t somebody think of the children?”!!!
Every child deserves to be brought up by a male parent and a female parent in, we must hope, a stable relationship. Of course, life often intervenes to prevent this but it is quite wrong to plan to bring a child into the world into different circumstances and wrong to manipulate the normal process of conception to achieve it. Doing so reduces the child to the status of a pet.
There’s no human right to be a parent and, to widen the debate slightly, infertility is not a disease.The needs and rights of the child must come first.

Sorry, Kathleen. Tampering with birth certificates isn’t even the thin end of the wedge, it’s the thick end: falsification of records so as not to hurt people’s feelings. It’s like pretending criminal convictions are ‘spent’ and therefore, supposedly, never happened. In other words, it’s a LIE.

What can I say? In this particular narrow case you are right. But you know perfectly well that the trans filth will take it, twist it, and tomorrow they will argue that a convicted child molester who yesterday discovered he is a ..”woman” has a valid claim to be listed as a mother on the birth certificate. After of course raping a real mother of a child in a women’s prison. That how it always ends. And the state will support it.

I do think birth certificates should reflect biological reality but it seems to me the current arrangements do reflect this as the birth mother is differentiated from the co-parent.

In Australia, back in the 1960s-70s there were people who called themselves “alternative” who refused to register the births of their children. I sometimes wonder what happened to those children. Without a birth certificate there are many aspects of civil life denied to you. Officially you do not exist.
More recently there has been a campaign to assist indigenous people to obtain official recognition of birth. The website says 18,000 people have been helped. https://pathfinders.ngo/projects/aboriginals/aboriginal-birth-certificate-project/

A very clear demonstration of why conservatives should never think that political lesbians are onside. The fight between them and the trans-mob is just an internal spat (think People’s Front of Judea).

I would think Meloni would have bigger fish to fry.

As usual a very logical but humanly attuned essay from Kathleen Stock. Initially I thought I might be disagreeing with her but it turned out not to be so.

As a genealogist it is useful that both parents are named and that normally means that the father is the second biological contributor to the child’s DNA. But with different social “marriage” arrangements and means of reproduction the old conventions can’t easily be applied.

It seems that the assertion of biological norms about the sexes – a man cannot become a woman, etc – eventually leads to the reassertion of biological norms around sex, too.

I greatly admire Kathleen Stock; and this well-argued piece is typical of the quality of thought and writing that lie behind my admiration. However, this argument raises fundamental questions not addressed by the article other than by listing a range of contrasting opinions, albeit with commendable even-handedness.

If it’s a basic aim of society to produce well-adjusted, happy children in the context of stable, long-lasting romantic relationships — and a lot of evidence suggests it should be — then it would be a wasted opportunity not to offer lesbian and gay couples policy tools that help them contribute to this process.

Should the state and law support same-sex parenting on the basis of equality with male-female parenting? Among the most compelling arguments against such support is Jephtha’s Children: the Innocent Casualties of Same-Sex Parenting (2016) by Robert Oscar Lopez — an account of several people, now all adults, who were raised in such families and have contributed short biographies to the book. It’s balanced in presentation and argument, and profoundly thought-provoking in the way it questions the presuppositions behind support for same-sex parenting and adoption.

“It would also be good to freely discuss the potential costs of unknown paternity or maternity for children generally, …” At least Kathleen Stock mentions this issue – most activists don’t – but this should be the start of the discussion and not just an afterthought.

Perfect start to the weekend – thank you Kathleen, for making wonderful sense of it all.
Never stop!