Freddy McConnell: A judge showing compassion to trans people shouldn’t be a surprise

Last week, the High Court ruled that a trans man should not have been denied a gender recognition certificate on the basis that he was trying to conceive. The ruling was emphatic on the law and immediately granted him the certificate he was and is entitled to. This news is by no means victory over the ongoing, state-sponsored campaign against our rights, but it is something.

It’s worth reading the judgment itself. It should not be remarkable that it is compassionately written and gives weight to the claimant’s perspective, but – for reasons we understand all too well by now – it is. The judge’s words didn’t move me because I am also a trans man who wanted to start his own family, but simply because I’m a trans person living in the UK in 2025. That someone as powerful as a High Court judge would see a trans person as a whole person, whose needs, rights and point of view matter, felt like something we could no longer hope for, let alone rely on.

The job of judges is to decide what the law means and intends. In recent years, in certain high-profile cases where trans people are concerned, some of them seem to have approached this as a purely academic exercise. They overlook – for reasons known only to them – the fact that this meaning and intent only exist, indeed, are created by the people and society in which the law operates.

In 2018, I went to court myself, asking to be recognised as father or parent on my child’s birth certificate. It’s worth comparing last week’s judgment with those I received in the High Court (PDF) and the Court of Appeal (PDF). The latter both contained extensive legal analysis yet lacked meaningful attempts to reconcile it with my children’s, mine or, more broadly, trans people’s current, lived realities. The first judgment did acknowledge “the lived reality of [me] being on a day to day basis in all ways [my child’s] father” but only as an aside to the judge’s primary concern: a “coherent administrative system”.

Harsh but pragmatic, you might think, except the coherence of our current birth certificate system only extends as far as married, heterosexual, cisgender couples with genetically-related children. It is the system created by legislation originally passed in 1953. If it isn’t actually coherent anymore – if it ever was – perhaps it was easier for the judge in our case to imagine that it is. Easier, say, than imagining the humanity of a trans man who desires fatherhood and has the courage to achieve it however he chooses. For its part, the Appeal Court judgement stalled at explaining that “mother” and “father” have different meanings. Or, as the Lord Chief Justice quipped, “dog” cannot be construed to mean “cat”.

When I read last week’s judgment, an intrusive thought groomed by exposure to anti-trans bias, said: What’s the catch? But, the lawyers tell me there is no catch and the gender recognition panel can’t appeal. This is simply good news, for trans people who are parents or want to be parents, but also for the great many who aren’t and don’t. This is some reassurance that the law means what it says, in the normal, everyday sense, not in some nightmarish, double-speak way. This is proof that you don’t have to be trans or, as the cliche goes, to love someone who is, to believe that if our fundamental rights don’t matter then no-one’s do. This doesn’t fix everything – far, far from it – but it is one data point in favour of hope.