Trans identities are increasingly subjected to contentious public and political debate in the UK, and this has resulted in resource to the law across various contexts. Against that background, this paper considers trans legal parenthood after the decision in R (McConnell and YY) v Registrar General for England and Wales. This judgment held that a trans man who gave birth was the legal ‘mother’ of his child. The wider consequence is that trans legal parenthood will not reflect trans identities, but birth-assigned sex/gender, regardless of whether the parent holds a gender recognition certificate. Separate from this underlying social and political context concerning trans identities, the paper argues that legal parenthood is a flexible and pragmatic concept, which lacks inherent normative content, and which has previously proved capable of accommodating a variety of different familial and reproductive circumstances. The paper argues that the gendered descriptors of ‘mother’ and ‘father’, while remaining the law's default, are not inherent to legal parenthood. Thus, the paper concludes that, despite the ongoing political and cultural debates concerning trans identities, the existing concept of legal parenthood is capable of properly recognising trans parenthood, without requiring any fundamental changes to the concept itself.

This paper explores the relationship between the concept of the ‘identity of the child’ and legal parenthood. It examines the role of identity in the determination of legal parenthood in three contexts: (a) parental orders after surrogacy arrangements; (b) disputed paternity cases; and (c) the statutory rules in cases involving gamete donation. This paper argues that the concept of ‘identity’ plays an inconsistent role in the attribution of legal parenthood, because the concept lacks substantive content within judicial reasoning and the statutory framework. The understanding of identity, and the role it plays, appears to change in these different contexts to serve the different purposes that the law is trying to achieve. The reason for this inconsistency is that, despite the utilisation of the language of the ‘child's identity’, legal parenthood remains adult-centric and premised upon replicating the binary, two-parent model of the nuclear family. We argue that instead of appealing to this incoherent concept of ‘identity’, the courts should explicitly engage with different types of parenthood and acknowledge the importance of each for both children and parents. Such an approach would result in more truly child-centred reasoning and serve to diminish the predominance of the binary, two-parent model.