The phrase “sex assigned at birth” was dreamed up to suggest that biological sex (male or female, determined at fertilization and encoded in chromosones) is not an objective reality but a label slapped on a baby by a doctor in a delivery room. As if maleness and femaleness were within the purview and authority of adults to decide. As if the biology was negotiable.
Most people now recognize this for what it is: a denial of biological reality. The fact of male and female can be suppressed for a while — dress it up, pump hormones into a body, issue new documents. But like pushing a beach ball under water, the truth surges back to the surface. Doctors cannot assign sex. We can only recognize it.
Now another denial of biological reality is surfacing, one that has quietly reshaped American family law for decades, and one most people don’t even know exists: surrogate parenting.
Parent Assigned at Birth
Every child ever born is the offspring of one man and one woman. One sperm, one egg. That biological fact creates a relationship as real and observable as the child’s sex. That child belongs to those two people, looks like those two people, and ideally is loved by those two people.
For most of human history, the law recognized this. The state did not create the parent-child bond any more than the delivering doctor created the baby’s sex. The state simply recorded what nature had already established.
That is no longer the case.
Through a legal doctrine known as “intent-based parenthood,” people no longer become parents only by creating a child. They can become parents by wanting a child badly enough and proving it with enough money, contracts, and lawyers. The adults who intend to be parents are legally declared to be parents. The child’s actual biological mother or father (who were often paid for their “contribution” of sperm, egg, or womb) are then thanked for their service, shown the door, and replaced on the birth certificate by whoever the adults have chosen. Labeled donors. Vendors. Nonessential actors in the creation of their own child. As if biology were a clerical error the courts can correct.
Adult Desires are Paramount
Notice the operating principle. It is the same one driving gender ideology: adult desire is sufficient to override biological fact. A child is born male, but if an adult really wants that child to be female, really wanting it is enough in the new regime. A child is born to a specific mother and father, but if an adult really wants that child to be theirs, really wanting it is enough. In both cases, a biological reality about a child is denied and overwritten because an adult’s desire demands it. The child’s biology is not a fact to be respected but an obstacle to be overcome.
If “sex assigned at birth” strikes you as Orwellian, “parent assigned at birth” should terrify you.
For decades, this played out in pockets. California led the way when its courts ruled in Johnson v. Calvert (1993) that “intent to parent” could determine legal parentage, later extending it in Buzzanca (1998) to establish “parents” with zero genetic connection to the child. Other states held the line, maintaining that children had a right to belong to the mother and father who created them.
Then came Obergefell. The 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage granted same-sex couples the “constellation of benefits” that opposite-sex couples enjoyed. One of those benefits: the right to be recognized as the parents of your children from the moment they are born. But here the court confronted an uncomfortable biological fact — two men or two women cannot both be biological parents of the same child. So how can access to that benefit be equalized? The court could have acknowledged that the marital presumption of parentage functions differently when biology functions differently. Instead, it mandated that every state provide adults full access to unrelated children, requiring them to legalize the mechanism to assign parents, not recognize them.
Two years later, Arkansas tried to push back. In Pavan v. Smith (2017), the state argued that birth certificates are biological documents, medical records giving children access to family health history. Surely the court didn’t intend to pretend children come from two women?
Wrong. Birth certificates, the court ruled, are also part of the “constellation” attached to marriage. The biological document that once recorded who a child came from became an instrument recording who the state assigns to that child.
Parent Assigned at Birth Became Constitutionally Mandated
The consequences of surrogate parenting for children are not theoretical. Donor-conceived adults describe “genealogical bewilderment,” a disenfranchisement from their own body. The largest study of donor-conceived adults found they were twice as likely to report substance abuse, twice as likely to report problems with the law, and 50 percent more likely to report mental health struggles, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors. Nearly half feared being romantically attracted to an unknown biological relative. Forty-three percent said they felt confused about who was even a member of their family.
The right to have your sex recognized and your parents recognized are two sides of the same coin, connected by biological facts. “Sex assigned at birth” says the state can override what your DNA tells you about your body. “Parent assigned at birth” says the state can override what your DNA tells you about your family. Both are lies, sold with compassionate language — “gender-affirming care” for one, “modern family” for the other.
We know better. The data is clear, the testimonies devastating. Children have a right to their biological mother and father, not adults assigned to them by the state, not strangers connected by contract. Their actual mother and father.
Any legal regime that gives the government the authority to assign parents at birth is an injustice to children. And any Supreme Court ruling that mandates it nationwide must fall.
