Despite the claims of trans activist India Willoughby this week, I am not a lesbian. Obviously neither is he. I am a feminist, though. When lesbian rights are under attack from the far-right, it would be absolutely unacceptable to stay quiet whilst it happened. Last week was quite a thorny time online, with inflamed debate raging like wildfire on the issue of same-sex parenting and the accompanying birth certificates of those children.

The torch was lit by Georgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister and leader of the nation’s right-wing coalition government, who announced in May that she would crack down on same-sex couples and lesbians being allowed to list themselves as co-parents on birth certificates. As a result, in a heartbreakingly cruel political move, they are now being removed. Women who thought they had the legal right to make decisions on behalf of children they are raising together, in a committed relationship with the birth mother, are now unable to do so. This includes essential legal permission, afforded by the birth certificate, to be able to collect a child from school or make emergency medical decisions for the child.

This is a bare-faced attack on LGB rights, and women of the UK who support lesbian women should not look away from that. In a cunning move Meloni additionally linked the ethical issues around surrogacy and egg donation, which attempts to muddy the water of what would otherwise be more widely acknowledged as clear bigotry against lesbian couples.

UK law is very clear about birth certificates for same-sex female couples. Since April 2009, it has allowed that, “Female couples can include both their names on their child’s birth certificate when registering the birth.”

A fault line cracked open in gender critical and feminist circles

A birth certificate has a number of legal functions in the UK. It can prove who you are for a variety of purposes like obtaining a passport or driving licence, registering for school, getting married and getting a mortgage. It can be used as proof when enrolling in sport, which is organised by age. It is a vital document, and every child born in the UK must have their birth registered within six weeks. It may or may not contain the name of the father, but it always states the name of the woman who gave birth to the child. Most of us don’t spend a huge amount of time talking or thinking about our birth certificates — until the past week that is.

As news of Meloni’s move against lesbian rights surfaced, a bright fault line cracked open in gender critical and feminist circles, and it began to tear off in many directions. Meloni was often forgotten as various stances were taken, and sometimes tempers flared. Many women assumed that “gender critical” women, who have taken the position that men cannot be lesbians, would also be outraged at this move by Meloni. After all, wasn’t it lesbian rights they were concerned for, when they raised the points about trans ideology?

It quickly became clear that there would not be automatic condemnation of this strike against lesbian rights. Focus switched away from Italy and to the UK. Many people were very clear that they thought that birth certificates should be an accurate record of both parents. The rationale seemed to be mainly that children should be able to trace fathers. Much mention was made of adoption and the rights that children should have to find birth parents. Claims were made that lots of people had a right to be involved in a child’s life, including extended family. Some were very clear that fathers must be named, no matter if the child was to be raised by lesbians, and that such lesbians were seeking validity of their relationship rather than caring for the child’s needs. This seemed particularly callous.

None of this is currently the law in the UK. There is a law that affords the right to lesbian mothers, and if we don’t agree with that, the only alternative is to seek to change it into something else. The adoption process has separate documentation intrinsic to it — birth parents are accounted for, and separate documents issued to adoptive parents. A child who is adopted can access their original birth certificate once 18 years of age.

Some raised the issue of sperm donors and how they should be named, but there is separate access for children to find out the identity of a sperm donor. For those asking for rights of access to grandparents, and uncles, and Fred down the road who is very nice and very interested, some of those people (not Fred, obviously) can apply to the court separately for “Parental Responsibility”, which would afford them a say in some of the limited circumstances when that would be necessary.

The recurrent feeling appeared to be that of men not being included, rather than lesbian women being removed. Some were sticking very firmly to the notion that men are utterly vital to a child’s life. You might think, listening to these people, that omitting a man, who masturbated once into a sterile container, from a child’s birth certificate was on a par with throwing the child into oncoming traffic. As @radfemlawyer points out, this simply is not so: “the UK is a pioneer in recognising the rights of donor-conceived children to access information about their donor and heritage.”

Male donors are not excluded. They are traceable, even if not legally responsible for a child in any way. It would be hard to get that sperm into enough of those sterile containers if men thought they might have to actually step up at some point in a child’s life — beyond their benevolent onanism.

Some commentators from the gender critical side of the debate were keen to say that they don’t want to strip the right of lesbians to place themselves on birth certificates, but they also “don’t agree with it”. I’m not sure how this is better. Being quietly against the rights of lesbians isn’t being more polite; it is being politically duplicitous when you will be happy to use an argument against trans ideology that protects the right to lesbian identity for same-sex attracted females. Lesbians aren’t a convenient tool to win a war if you are simultaneously unwilling to stand up when their legal rights are under attack. That is political indifference at best and cowardice at worst.

Men are not validated by being on a birth certificate

Some of the arguments, in favour of insisting it is essential to the rights of the child that a man is on a birth certificate, are centred on a cosy notion of a heterosexual ideal with involved and benign men who become involved and benign fathers. We live in a climate where male violence against women is rife, and one in five women will experience sexual violence in their lifetime; one in four will experience domestic abuse. Some women will experience both. We can assume that a large number of women will be in relationships with these men, and a similarly large number of the children of those women will be bystanders to that violence. Some women will wish to exclude these men from the rights afforded them by being named on a birth certificate. This is where the fault lines in the gender critical movement and its alliance to feminist women become exposed more clearly. Feminist women see beyond the single issue to every aspect of the experience of living life in a female body.

A small number of gender critical women assert that heterosexual couples are the ideal parenting unit, as Kellie Jay Keen did this week when she said, “Do I think in an ideal world all things being equal, children would like to be raised by both their father and their mother? Yes, I do, sorry.”

I can understand the arguments that insist that men are not allowed to identify as female on birth certificates. I can understand the difficulty if men were to be listed as mothers on such birth certificates. That isn’t the case. They would not be as they didn’t give birth. I think the notion of a woman and a man being automatically more desirable as a parenting unit is outdated and dangerous. Many women wishing to escape violent men worry desperately about how it will affect their children to be raised in a single-parent household, and some stay with that man and die at his hands. It is dangerous political rhetoric to imply they are escaping “the ideal” family.

Rather than insisting that male parents are utterly crucial to a child’s life and that it is essential they are given legal rights to parent, we should be addressing the number of children plunged into poverty by the cost-of-living crisis. We could focus on the single mothers doing tremendous parenting, who are unsupported financially by absent men and abandoned by the state after they have had two children — as the “rape clause” brought in by the Tories and now seemingly backed by Labour ensures. Requiring that women have been raped before providing them with resources to feed a third child is unfathomably brutal.

As Ali Ceesay of Sisters Salon, the feminist collective in Brighton, told me, “What kids need more than a male is a house free of lethal mould, outside spaces they can play in without air pollution or being forced into County Lines drug dealing. The need to have a mum who isn’t hungry and not able to run the washing machine because there isn’t enough electricity. Those things are all more important than a male role model, but you won’t hear the right wing politicians speak of that unless it’s to blame the overripe wombs of single mothers!”

The purpose of a birth certificate is not that it be a “daddy tracker”. Men are not validated or invalidated by being on a birth certificate, and neither are lesbian mothers. The birth certificate provides a record of a child’s birth primarily for use in legal situations. It was never intended to be a record of genealogy. It is impossible to guarantee that men who are named are actually the biological father without a DNA check. If a female same-sex couple uses the egg of one woman which is then implanted into the womb of her partner, then who is the mother? The sperm donor, as discussed before, is recorded, and his identity is legally accessible to the child.

If there are covert attacks on lesbian rights by far-right groups in Europe, we shouldn’t see that as an opportunity for debate around UK law, or we risk endorsing their political actions. Not telling men they can identify as women on birth certificates is certainly correct — but telling lesbian women they can’t identify as “co-parents” when they get up each day to do the difficult job of co-parenting is quite another.