With this decision, the Toulouse Court of Appeal held that a transgender woman had the right to be designated as the mother of her child when she had conceived the child before undergoing gender affirmation surgery. V., the claimant, and N.D. married and had two children. In 2009, V. successfully applied to change her civil status from male to female. She conceived the child that was the subject of these proceedings in 2014. She sought to be registered as the child’s mother, as opposed to as a surrogate, but the civil register refused. Until the decision of the Court of Appeal, only the claimant’s partner, their child’s biological mother, was listed on the child’s birth certificate. The claimant successfully argued, among other things, that it would be in the best interests of the child to have the claimant linked as the biological parent on the birth certificate. The decision was the first of its kind in France, and the result of eight years of proceedings. The Toulouse Court of Appeal referred in particular to the primacy of the child’s best interests, enshrined in the New York Convention, and to the right to respect for private and family life and the right to sexual self-determination, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights (Articles 8 and 14). It found that those conventions require that a child born to a couple including a transgender person have the right to have both parents legally recognized, and that those conventions were not contrary to French national law.
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