Ido Katri has posted Fathers Who Give Birth, Mothers Who Give Sperm: Rethinking Legal Parenthood at the Threshold of Gender Recognition on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Across jurisdictions, transgender parents whose gender has been legally recognized find that recognition suspended at the moment of birth registration. A trans man registered as male is compelled to appear as ‘mother’; a trans woman registered as female is listed as ‘father’. This article examines why parental designation operates as a site where legal gender recognition routinely collapses, and argues that the resistance stems not from biological necessity or children’s best interests but from the administrative state’s investment in preserving the gendered architecture of the civil-status register. Drawing on socio-legal scholarship and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, the article develops the concept of administrative gender performativity and identifies a trinity of reiterated citations—sex assigned at birth, legal gender, and parental designation—through which birth registration produces and sustains binary coherence. Through a comparative analysis of A.H. and Others v Germany and O.H. and G.H. v Germany before the European Court of Human Rights, alongside the largely unexamined Israeli Supreme Court decision in HCJ 3148/18, the article demonstrates that despite divergent outcomes, both legal orders deploy biology, evidentiary authority, and the child’s best interests to protect the symbolic coherence of the register itself. Both systems converge on a shared logic of containment in which reproductive function overrides legal gender and trans parenthood is treated as a deviation to be managed rather than a reality to be recognized. The article then argues that existing parentage law already contains the doctrinal resources to resolve these conflicts. Stripped of gendered labels, parentage doctrine reveals functional and temporal principles—immediate responsibility assigned at birth to the birthing parent, enduring parental status governed by legal gender—capable of accommodating trans parenthood without misgendering, exceptionalism, or normative reform.
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