 Hello everyone, my name's Liam and I'm a PhD student at the University of Bristol and today I'm going to be talking to you about the birth registration system in England and Wales. This relates to my doctoral research which looks at the birth registration system and it's relation to modern families and the modern family is essentially one that isn't a traditional family and a traditional family is a typical nuclear family, cisgender, man, woman, with children and all those typical or stereotypical associations you might think of when you think of a family, so I'm looking at modern families. And what's quite nice, I think, about this talk is I'm keeping it quite generalized, so I'm looking at multiple facets of the birth registration system rather than focusing in particular on a particular topic, but a lot of the themes that I raise in relation to this talk are already spoken about by other academics as part of this project. So, marriage and civil partnership, contrigalty, parenthood, surrogacy, there are separate talks on this that you can go and have a look at if you're interested and they'll also be uploading a further resources list in case you want to have a read of any of the things that I mentioned as part of this talk. And you've also got my email and my Twitter on the slides there if you want to get in contact with that and I think please feel free to do so. So I'm just going to start with a brief legislative overview before going on to talking about the historical underpinnings of registration generally and then going on to talk about queer theory, which will be the main, I believe, theoretical underpinning of my PhD and then I'll go on to talk about some PACE studies through which you can see birth registration in action. So if we're looking at the main legislative overviews or legislations in place for birth registration, they're on the slides there, but you have the Birth and Death Registration Act 1953, the associated regulations of 1987 and the HFEA 2008. And there are a few points I just want to make in relation to those pieces of legislation to the purposes of this talk. So as a result of those, a mother must be identified at birth and there can only ever be one mother. So it's important just to highlight from the outset, but I will mention this in more detail as we go along that a mother isn't necessarily a woman, so the courts and the law has recognised that trans men give birth and do give birth, but they must be registered as a mother. And in relation to there only ever being one mother, following the HFEA 2008, we have the creation of what's called a second female parent. And this was essentially to acknowledge that lesbian couples exist, that lesbians have children and of course they should be able to register them on the birth certificate. But of course, the two women are recognised or documented in distinct ways. So you have one mother and one parent, which is arguably in the law's pursuit of prioritising mother status and ensuring that the child knows who their mother is. And then just generally in relation to birth registration, what you see in terms of who can register the child is not only a prioritisation of the mother, so a lot of the rights associated with registering the child or birth registration generally. It's quite contingent upon the mother's consent and the mother's say so. But if you're married or in a civil partnership, you are not only automatically in most circumstances registered or recognised as a parent, but you're able to then have that registered on the birth certificates because you're in a legally recognised relationship. And that relates to a kind of wider prioritisation in law of legitimate relationships and those that are within those consoles of relationships. The position with unmarried or uncivil partnered parents is slightly more complicated. But again, it just really comes down to the mother's consent. So if, for example, they're not married or in a civil partnership, but somebody undergoes facility treatment under the HFEA, providing certain conditions and met, they'll then be able to be recognised as a second parent. But it doesn't necessarily follow that they'll have a right to be on the birth certificate straight away. So if they are unmarried, the mother can just choose to register the birth themselves and leave the father or other parent off. That's their progressive, but there may be a chance for a re-registration of the birth at a later date. And at that point, it's important to note as well, there has been a change or a shift in recent years towards joint birth registration following the Welfare Reform Act 2009. And under some schedules in that act, it would allow, for example, unmarried fathers to be registered following a paternity test. But the relevant schedules aren't yet in force, and whether they will is another question. So it was about 11 years ago now, but that kind of is in the pipeline. And just finally, I kind of wanted to note, if you hadn't already realised that birth registration in and of itself is quite gendered. So two men are not able to initially register a birth, two women are, but two men can't. They have to get a parental order through surrogacy, which I'll come on to explain in more detail towards the end. So just moving on to a brief historical overview. So prior to civil registration, which came out or was initiated in the 1800s and 1836, you have this idea of a parish register. And what was recorded on those registers was the baptism date and not the birth date. And lots continued to use these parish registers even after civil registration was introduced. And that was in part due to the emphasis placed on baptism at the time. So baptism was a really important religious right and lots of they were called dissenters. So people who dissented from the established church's way of living and way of religion. They continued to use these registers because they saw registration as being to do with documents in the religious right of baptism. Whereas civil registration then moved on to being more secular, more non ecclesiastical and didn't really mention baptism. And so, yes, parish registration came out in the 1500s under Thomas Cromwell. And I'll just quote what he said himself, the reasons for registration were. So he said they were for the avoiding of sundry strife and processes and contentions arising from age, Lineal dissent, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy and for knowledge. So there's a lot going on there. But what I really want to hammer home is this idea that birth registration, since his inception in the 1500s, was never really to do with a child seeing their origins or a child, a place for the child to see their parents. It was really just to do with property rights, not only, but it was to do with securing inheritance and succession rights and particularly those regarding property. It was never really to do with the child welfare or the child's best interests. So you have to kind of really bear that in mind then when civil registration was introduced in 1836, as the first registered general Thomas Lister kind of himself noted as such that, yes, OK, we're now moving towards a more non ecclesiastical nature of registration. But one of the real reasons underpinning civil registration again was this need for property and succession rights and to ensure that we know where property is going. But in recent years, there has been a shift in the meaning and function of birth registration to the extent that we now arguably see it as a way for the child to see their origins, a way for the child to engage with their biogenetic underpinnings, their progenitors, who their parents are. But as I've mentioned, that wasn't really the case when registration was first initiated either in the 1500s or later on when civil registration was introduced. That seems to be, and I've got to do a lot more research on this, but that seems to be a rather recent invention where we're now seeing it to do with something regarding the child. But that wasn't, as I keep saying, a reason for it since its inception. So just bear that in mind. Okay, so moving on to queer theory. So as I mentioned, this is going to be the main underpinning theoretical perspective, I think in my PhD or it will be rather. And if I had to define it or not if I had to define it, if it had to be defined in a generalized way, it would be that queer theory aims to challenge, interrogate, destabilize and subvert. And that's always in pursuit of the normative hegemony of the time. So any of those norms and values which underpin society in favor of the hegemony, queer theory seeks to interrogate and deconstruct those to be more inclusive for everyone. So that links quite nicely to Judith Butler's concept of unintelligibility and that's Judith Butler on the slide there. So Butler defines unintelligibility and I'll just quote Butler as, So to find you are unintelligible is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human and it's defined that one's language is hollow and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favor. So that's really just talking about the need to be recognized at all in general. If you're unintelligible you are not able to be recognized in general but by law, by society, you are unintelligible. And that links again quite nicely to the concept of heteronormativity and that's the idea that in society or just in general that everyone's presumed to be straight, to be heterosexual. And also closely related to that is the concept of cisnormativity where you're presumed to be cisgender, the idea that you identify with the sex and gender you were assigned at birth. And so what these concepts of heteronormativity and cisnormativity are is that they are intelligible but it needs to be explained or thought about much. They are embedded in the very structures through which we navigate our daily lives and that's why and it contributes to this narrative of gay and trans people or anyone on the LGBT plus spectrum of identities. These people are consistently having to come out and explain, no I am not heterosexual, I'm not cisgender but because society and the structures which are embedded within it, presumed people are gay and trans people etc. are consistently having to come out and explain that I'm not. And Judith Butler talks about this notion of unintelligibility but in relation to the idea that because you can make someone intelligible by describing them you shouldn't always presume that they were intelligible. So that sounds quite complicated but what I think Judith Butler is trying to get at and what I will try to explain is that arguably you can define anything. So by defining it you are arguably making it intelligible because you can explain it, that's only happening because we are explaining it. If the societal structures and the legal structures don't recognise it, arguably that person or the thing under consideration is still unintelligible. So it's given example, if you take a birth registration and a transparent for example, a trans man who gives birth so they will be noted as the mother. So they are arguably intelligible because the law is recognising them to an extent is recognising a birth has taken place and that a parent is there, albeit they are recognising a trans man as a mother. So arguably they are intelligible but on the other side on the flip hand they are still unintelligible because the law isn't recognising the social and factual reality underpinning that family structure. So just because we can explain it and the law can explain it, it makes it intelligible but underneath the surface it's still unintelligible because the law isn't engaging with the actual reality of that family life. So hopefully I've explained that. And then just moving on to another facet of queer theory, we have this idea of anti-assimilatriness and to quote Chambers of Carver on the slide there, it's demanding rights from the states, it's not always the art so when doing so may also tend to reify certain heterosexual norms. So this can be related quite nicely to the idea of same sex marriage where assimilation is not really seen as liberation, some queer theorists might see same sex marriage and those that participate in it as just succumbing or becoming subsumed within heterosexual ideas of identity and relationship recognition. So queer theorists might instead say they're not better to deconstruct the values and norms which prioritise heterosexual marriage from which queer people were historically disbanded from, they weren't allowed to marry because it was seen as a heterosexual institution so queer theory might say they're not better to deconstruct the values and norms which allowed that to happen and to build from the ground up and to perhaps abolish marriage and start a new institution that is inherently inclusive of queer people and all people rather than just a specific subset of society. And closely related to that you have this idea of homonormativity which is where some LGBT plus people or people in general think that the best way to achieve equality is to have heterosexual norms imposed upon LGBT plus people. So homonormativity really is about assimilation, some LGBT plus people are happy to be assimilated, they're happy to become subsumed within dominant ideas of identity because they see that as achieving equality. But for a lot of people as it says on the slide there assimilation isn't liberation because the structures which allowed that to happen in the first place are still there, we're just now allowed to be part of it. And then just very quickly I think it's important to highlight a potential criticism of queer theory but also something that could help make it better. So you have this idea of intersectionality and adversity's queer theory and intersectionality was pioneered by the common be river collective but was kind of made into a more coherent analytical lens via the academic Kimberley Crenshaw. And what intersectionality does is it looks at the various axes of oppression and uses these as a way to explain how and why certain people will have a different life experience than others. That's a very brief way of explaining it. But to give an example a black gay woman might have or will have a very different experience to a white gay man for example. And intersectionality is about looking at those different subsections of identity and honing in on those to an extent to explain why certain things happen and why things are the way they are. And that could be seen to be in conflict with queer theory which is about destabilising these ideas of identity. And Kathy Cohen writing as a black feminist wrote a really influential article on this and spoke about how intersectionality in kind of clinging on to these ideas of identity could be used as a tool to extend our thinking of identity power and oppression. So she was quite critical of this mainstream queer politics and activism which could potentially ignore those outside of the mainstream queer. And whenever we talk about something mainstream it's typically coded with dominant ideas of being queer. So usually white upper class and Cohen herself says that in our article saying in the same ways that we must account for the varying privilege to be gained by a heterosexual identity. We must also pay attention to the privilege some queer receive from being white male and upper class. So that to her is what the mainstream queer is. And so of course black queer women, black trans women anything other than that kind of dominant idea of what it means to be queer. I like to be left by the wayside and hence won't have their needs and wants adequately forefronted in this queer activism. So what Kathy Cohen and a lot of others say is that we can't forget those that aren't within the mainstream because in then seeking to dismantle norms we're not going to be dismantling norms for everyone. We're only inevitably going to be dismantling them for the mainstream. So we need to be aware of that and centre these more marginalised and oppressed voices so that we can seek to destabilise norms for all people and not just the mainstream. And then just very finally on queer theory and its relation to birth, registration and family life. I've kind of outlined some questions that queer or intersectional queer theory might seek to ask in relation to birth registration. So the first cluster might look at ideas such as what does one's origins refer to? Does the birth certificate contain one's origins? Is such an understanding of origins universal or is it quite Western centric? And should we continue to emphasise biology and genetics in claims to parenthood? And then the second cluster is whether the current laws are more likely to privilege white Western families and their understandings of kinship. So there was an article by someone called Förstenberg and others and they looked at kinship in alternative family structures in Western industrialised societies. And one of the many things they found was that black families were more likely to note this idea of voluntary kinship. And what voluntary kinship is is this kinship structure in the absence of blood or legal ties. So they are kin because they say they're kin, they are voluntary kin. And that's not to say that those black families would want that legitimated in law. That's not to say they'd want it registered or anything like that. But the point is that if they wanted their unique family structure registered they wouldn't be able to because of the way in which English and Welsh law is currently tethered to two parent model ideas of family life. And that also relates to polyamorous and co-parenting relationships where there may be more than two legal parents but of course that won't be able to be recognised in law because you can only have two legal parents. Although some jurisdictions do allow for free or more but England or Wales doesn't at the moment. And then just finally do modern families want to be assimilated? Are they intelligible by their very nature? And is it not better to destabilise the norms and values which prioritise the traditional family? And in that sense potentially to abolish family as we know it. And just on that I wanted to highlight that the concept of abolition is quite key to black feminist activism and black feminism generally. And this idea of abolishing the family was kind of born out of black feminist activism decades ago. It's not a new idea but it is enjoying a recent resurgence in terms of the literature around family abolition. But it was born out of black feminist activism I think a fair few decades ago. So just now moving on to some different avenues through which you might want to explore birth registration. I'll just start with trans parents. So you have the Gender Recognition Act which regulates sex and gender recognition in England and Wales. And there is this tension between section 9 and section 12. So the Gender Recognition Act gives a trans person a gender recognition certificate and the certificate will state that trans person as they're acquired or they're self-identified sex and gender. And I'm going to allow them to live as that sex and gender. Section 9 says subject to some exceptions that this will be for all purposes. But then section 12 has one of these exceptions which is that in relation to parenthood that it will not affect your status as the mother or father of the child. So section 9 on the one hand says okay yep for all purposes subject to some exceptions. And then section 12 says excuse me one of those is parenthood. And that relates to this idea of what SHARP calls a biologic which is where the assigned sex at birth and the stereotypically associated traits of that. So being a man and providing sperm for example that's what it comes down to at the end of the day. So if you were assigned male at birth and you provided sperm you're going to become a father even if you transition and receive legal recognition as a woman. There is this kind of inherent mismatch between the law and identity here. And that's what leads to the creation of male mothers and female fathers in law. So I'll just focus on the McConnell case because that case has recently gone through the Court of Appeal and the UK Supreme Court have recently denied permission to appeal to the Supreme Court so they are looking to go to the European Court of Human Rights. And in McConnell just very briefly so that's McConnell on the slide there. What happened in McConnell was, Freddie McConnell was assigned female at birth. He underwent, he transitioned to male legally. He has a certificate to bruise though. The facility clinic treated him as male. He gave birth and then had to obviously register as the mother and he brought his legal case to change the birth registration system to see whether he could be registered as the father or the parent. And what the Court of Appeals seem to do in the most recent judgment would say that mother is gender neutral. Of course it is. Everyone knows that it's gender neutral. Again in law but it didn't really engage with this societal social understanding of mother so any real extent in the sense that mother in society is likely to be associated with women because of course Freddie is a man that might not be an acceptable term but the judges kind of got around that by saying no we're recognising that Freddie is a man and that he gave birth he just has to register as the mother. We know he's a man but he's still a mother. That kind of goes in opposition to some research that I conducted a survey as part of my Masters which showed that nearly half think men cannot be mothers but also more generally that trans people's self-identified parental status should be respected and that people think about sex, gender and parenthood in multifaceted ways. So that was recently published in the International Journal of Transgender Health and I'll include a link if you're interested because it's really exciting. But of course it then relates to a further idea that the law is refusing to acknowledge the social and factual reality of trans parents and families and this is when we then start to see a change in the perception and understanding of the birth registration system from being to do with property to being concerned with the child's rights. So in my research I'm going to be quite interested to see how and why these changes have occurred but of course one reason for that could be that the child's welfare is the paramount consideration under the Children Act so anything concerning children, their rights ultimately become paramount and of course that's the reason why the judgement said in the child's best interests a Freddie has to be registered as a mother. So we are starting to see this shift between already we've seen this change in the birth registration systems to do with property to now being to do with the child's welfare. So that's trans parents moving on to surrogacy. So surrogates have to register the birth as they are legally the mother because they give birth and their partner if they have one will be presumed to be the other legal parents and there is a separate talk on surrogacy so I won't get too bogged down with the details but what I think is quite important to highlight for the purposes of this talk is that when parents are registered on the birth certificate following a parental order so what will happen is the intended parents will apply to the court and say we're the parents, the court will usually give them a parental order which overlays the original birth certificate and kind of seals that away and keeps it confidential and then they're giving a parental order a new birth certificate which lists them as the parent and not the mother and father or the father and father and mother and mother. It's always parent so here we're seeing a prioritization of the traditional family and those that can be assimilated within its consoles to allow only those family structures to have a mother and father on the birth certificate and that I think is really interesting because unless you know what you're looking for you wouldn't know anything is different but if you saw someone's birth certificate and it had parent and parent, again if you knew what you were looking for you would know straight away that that particular child was born to a non-normative family structure so it could be adoption because in adoption that is also with parent and parent but straight away what you would know if you knew what you were looking for is that this child was born to a different kind of family that was born to a traditional family or one that can have access to those terms and trans people can access these terms as you would already be aware with trans men they can be mothers but of course if a trans man and a trans woman had procreative sex and had a child the trans man would have to register as the mother and the trans woman would have to be the father so whilst they can gain access to these traditional statuses it's done so on a mismatch of their identities and not really appreciating the role and the social role they will play in their child's life and just ultimately just a very quick point in terms of seeing the birth registration system or the birth certificate as a site to see one's origins this was quite prevalent and permeated throughout parliamentary discussions when discussing the human fertilisation and embryology bill so particularly on the idea of enabling two women to be registered on the birth certificate you have people in parliament say it's a very odd way of putting things or it's an odd way of pursuing the truth and a kind of general idea that to not mention don't a conception is equivalent to the state being complicit in a lie so you have these very truth centric, origin centric narratives emerging in parliament around 2007 if not earlier and of course it's completely flat as in the face of the reasons for registration in its inception and it does demonstrate to me a fundamental flawed understanding of what birth registration was for and of course that's changed arguably in recent years but it wasn't the reason for its historical inception and of course origins narratives are inextricably tied with normative ideas of the family and unmarried fathers were not even explicitly catered for in registration until 1874 so when civil registration came around in 1836 there was no direct provision made for the registering of a putative father because what mattered was establishing a legitimate line of dissent and in those days that was easier to see through the mother so again all about property and it kind of elucidates this idea of the social construction of origins we're kind of choosing what we want to be on the birth certificate at particular times so unmarried fathers weren't deemed that important in 1836 but they were in 1874 so what's the reason for that what could be the reason for that and then just very briefly looking at some future reform ideas by way of conclusion could it be that we default gender neutral language so you just pair it on the birth certificate it's been done in other jurisdictions such as Malta and Ontario but would it be enough? probably not, maybe not because the norms underpinning that traditional family would still be there we'd probably have to abolish the system and start from the ground up to really potentially get rid of those normative ideas of family life but that would also have various knock-on effects in England and Wales so for example the mother automatically requires parental responsibility so if we do just go for a defaulted parent how would we distinguish between the parent who gave birth the parent who didn't and of course that then relates to wider questions such as do we want to continue prioritising that gestative link that gestation, the childbirth do we want to continue prioritising that maybe we do in which case would the parent who gives birth be enough these are definitely questions to be had and then this does relate as well to the erasure some would say of cisgender women so in recognising that not only women give birth but non-binary people can and trans men can some would see this as an erasure of what it means to be a woman a femalehood and I should have mentioned earlier that non-binary people aren't currently registered or able to be recognised in English and Welsh law you can only be mad and female so whilst a non-binary person can give birth they will be treated as the sex they were assigned at birth and then as I mentioned in terms of abolition can we just abolish the current system so Marilyn Crawshaw in that 2017 article talks about abolishing the system as we understand it at the moment and having a sole certificate of legal parentage and on that it would have just your legal parents but it would have a note somewhere to say that ok this is just your legal parents if you want to know more about your biological or getting in contact with the relevant authority or whoever it may be so that could be one way of reforming but I would say that I think we need a more robust and coherent understanding of what we want the birth certificate to do for and what is birth registration for generally before we can really start to engage with these normative questions around birth registration so it's all fair and well said and we can abolish the system but I think first we need to understand what we would want it to do if we were then to start from the ground up then it would be a really robust understanding of that and of course we then have to be aware and be privy to the ability for the traditional family to still potentially reign supreme because it's embedded in the very structures of society so we'd have to be aware of all those normative questions and then related to that is the idea of whether sex and gender needs to be registered at all so there's been a recent resurgence in this there's been two whole volumes of journal articles of journals in general dedicated to the kind of the certification of sex gender on official documents and those were on the slide there and then just a final question and I think that's quite a nice one to end on is how can we fundamentally disassociate or problematise hegemonic understandings of family which inherently marginalises those who fall outside this and will particularly impact on queer families or trans families and surrogates and surrogacy which is what I've looked at in this talk so abolition might be the way forward so that is the ends I hope I've done it justice hope you found it interesting as I say my contact details were on the front slide if you want to get into contact and talk about anything that's absolutely fine but yeah thank you very much for listening thank you