Rolfe
Adult human female
Bloke. Now we're really through the looking-glass.
Cont: Trans Women are not Women 4
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ponderingturtle
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As silly as some kid having two mommies or two daddies. Outrageous and impossible. Hence only biological parents should be on birth certificates so no father allowed in the case of sperm donation.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I assume that's handled by the UK's excellent education system. All that remains is for attentive schoolchildren to understand that they did in fact emerge from their father's vagina.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I mean if you have two daddies, great. But if one of your daddies produced the egg that was inseminated to conceive you, and gestated you in their womb, and birthed you from their birth canal... maybe you should be informed that one of your daddies is a woman.
If we can have two daddies and no mommies, I see no reason why we can't have female daddies. As long as we're all clear on who's who and what's what.
Meadmaker
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It has been a while since I've seen a news story about this, but I know that there were moves in some places in the US to put "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" on the birth certificate, and get rid of "mother" and "father" altogether.
I suppose you have to ask yourself what the birth certificate is supposed to convey. Is it some sort of presumptive genetic record, or is it a record of who is responsible for the child at birth?
I'm not much keen on calling transmen men in any circumstances, but I guess it's no weirder on a birth certificate than anywhere else. If the law of your country recognizes someone who just gave birth as a man, then putting "father" on the birth certificate is no more insane than any other aspect of calling someone a man after they have given birth.
I suppose you have to ask yourself what the birth certificate is supposed to convey. Is it some sort of presumptive genetic record, or is it a record of who is responsible for the child at birth?
I'm not much keen on calling transmen men in any circumstances, but I guess it's no weirder on a birth certificate than anywhere else. If the law of your country recognizes someone who just gave birth as a man, then putting "father" on the birth certificate is no more insane than any other aspect of calling someone a man after they have given birth.
I think terms like "maternal parent" and "paternal parent" would adequately convey the relevant biological information without assuming social roles.
But I have to ask: how are the parents described on adoption birth certificates? I know in the US there is nothing that directly indicates that a child was adopted on the certificate. So when a same sex couple adopts are two men both listed as father and two women listed as mother? In any case, no biological information is recorded on the certificate. So how important is it to do so?
In other words, on a certificate that is only presented or referred to in a few select situations, I don't see why it's a big deal from either point of view.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
"Maternal" and "paternal" sure sound like assuming social roles to me.
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I just wish I could claim it was intentional...Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
I suppose we need to make them more inclusive. We can list them as "sperm giver" and "womb haver". Which is much more humanizing, of course.
Louden Wilde
Muse
Those terms may have those connotations with the general public (e.g. "paternalistic' behavior), but in genetics - including clinical genetics -, we commonly refer to maternally inherited and paternally inherited variants (alleles). Knowing which is which can be important in establishing inheritance patterns. There are other genes (so called imprinted genes - a major part of my research when I was in academia) where knowing whether the variant was inherited from an oocyte (i.e. maternally-derived) or from a sperm made a difference in the phenotype (some genes are marked differently in the two germlines).
Minor rant: While reviewing a clinical genetics case today, I "wasted" an hour or so trying to figure out whether a genetic test on a fetus was correctly being called as negative (for a pathogenic variant). The problem was that the mother was supposed to have said variant, and was also coming up negative. This raised the question as to whether the fetus was really negative for the variant, or the sequencing assays were just not properly picking up the variant (amplification bias)
Digging in further, I saw that an egg donor donor had been used in this pregnancy.
Finally it became clear that the DNA that had been labeled as maternal was from the woman who was carrying the fetus - not the egg donor - and therefore not useful as a control. Whoever had set up the case had not been paying attention- or least not thought it through.
I bring up this case as the discussion above makes me reflexively NOT want a paternal parent (i.e. person from whom sperm originated) to be listed as a mother. I get that obfuscating/glossing over things can sometimes make us feel better, but it can also cause problems.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
When you bring up these kinds of irrelevant distinctions, it feels like you're dismissing my gender identity on purpose. I'm a woman in every way that matters. Pointing out that I don't have a womb is hate speech.
JihadJane
not a camel
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Too bioessentialist. How about something more playful and child-friendly, like "Spunky" and "Egg Box"?
Ron Obvious
Graduate Poster
Emily's Cat
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I already refer to other people's children as "sex-fruit" so why not?
Emily's Cat
Rarely prone to hissy-fits
Hmm. I give it 6/10. Good form, correct trigger words. But it lacks the appropriate confrontational tone, it's far too polite.
ponderingturtle
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Who goes on this birth certificate
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/12/51-year-old-illinois-surrogate-gives-birth-her-granddaughter/6248492002/
"Serving as a gestational carrier for her daughter, a 51-year-old woman gave birth to her granddaughter this month.
The family welcomed Briar, a healthy baby girl, in an Illinois hospital on Nov. 2. Julie Loving, 51, delivered the newborn with her daughter, Breanna Lockwood, by her side."
Please that is vitally important to all ways in which they are referred too after all. And no just putting the husband on birth certificates as the father anymore, we need genetic testing so they don't get on their unless the child is theirs. Sperm donation also needs to have the sperm donor noted.
And people seem so against nice bright line biological definitions of male and female where a hysterectomy makes one neuter gender instead of female. That is simple biology people.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/11/12/51-year-old-illinois-surrogate-gives-birth-her-granddaughter/6248492002/
"Serving as a gestational carrier for her daughter, a 51-year-old woman gave birth to her granddaughter this month.
The family welcomed Briar, a healthy baby girl, in an Illinois hospital on Nov. 2. Julie Loving, 51, delivered the newborn with her daughter, Breanna Lockwood, by her side."
Please that is vitally important to all ways in which they are referred too after all. And no just putting the husband on birth certificates as the father anymore, we need genetic testing so they don't get on their unless the child is theirs. Sperm donation also needs to have the sperm donor noted.
And people seem so against nice bright line biological definitions of male and female where a hysterectomy makes one neuter gender instead of female. That is simple biology people.
Yeah, seems to me the parentage listed on the birth certificate has long been one of the things that’s more about a social role and often not about a biological reality. Factors like “genetic testing isn’t done” and “fertility donors aren’t listed” means the birth certificate has always been more of ‘a lead to follow up when trying to discover,’ than ‘a document of,’ genetic parentage for the kid on it.
But we do need a strong public understanding that you need to be bringing genetic facts with you when you rock up at the genetic disease test doctors.
But we do need a strong public understanding that you need to be bringing genetic facts with you when you rock up at the genetic disease test doctors.
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theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Raises the question of whether a birth certificate is - or should be - a formal and accurate clinical genetic document.
Also, in the context of this discussion, I think the generally-recognized connotations of the terms are relevant, and the narrow definition of a particular technical jargon is not.
Meadmaker
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It's another one of those problems that just didn't exist until the late 20th century.
The only thing you could do on a birth certificate was identify the mother and the most likely father. You wouldn't be able to actually use the knowledge of genetics even if you had it, so putting down "the mailman" in the father slot wouldn't have done any good anyway.
I suppose there must have been some birth certificates with "unknown" in the father slot, surely?
And the primary role of the birth certificate was for the county government to have a record of who lived there, and possibly verify age and identity if the subject ever came up. I wonder how they were really used in ancient days? Did my great-grandfather in Pike County, Missouri ever actually show his birth certificate to anyone? My mother, in Dublin, Ireland, can remember when her birth certificate was issued. She was about six years old when her mother took her and her five siblings down to the registrar's office. Apparently it didn't matter all that much that there was no record of their existence, but at some point my grandmother decided there had to be. This would have been in 1930.
Well, today, we could actually make use of the information about genetic ancestry, so should we keep a record of it, and should it appear on a birth certificate? In that case, "two mommies" still isn't really an option. At least for now, there has to be one sperm, and one egg, and each one had to come from a specific, unique, individual. Should the government have a record of that, and how much effort should they go to in order to find out whether the claimant of sperm donor and, in the case of IVF or surrogate pregnancies, the egg donor is actually the real source?
Louden Wilde
Muse
Yes, things are changing rapidly. Soon we'll be able to predict what common polygenic (where many genes contribute a small effect) diseases a person is likely to get during their lifetime. And with the epigenetic clock, we can already predict when a person is likely to die
And of course people are already being IDed for crimes if they have relatives that have taken direct-to-consumer genetic tests.
To get back on track (somewhat), 23 & Me notes that if you turn on their relative-finder service, others may be able to infer your sex. E.g. if you ID as female, but find relatives via shared Y chromosome sequences, they *may* be able to figure it out.
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