‘Parents’, not father and mother: Kerala trans couple win key legal victory

In 2023, Ziya and Zahaad, her 25-year-old partner and a trans man, moved the Kerala High Court after the birth of their daughter seeking a direction to the Kozhikode Municipal Corporation to mark them as “parents” in her birth certificate. On Monday, a Single Bench of Justice Ziyad Rehman AA directed the civic body to issue the certificate by removing the columns for “mother” and “father”, instead incorporating the names of petitioners as parents.

In its ruling, the court observed that the law of the land must evolve “in tune with the new concepts of human life and changes in society, and when the statutory provision on a particular point is not in tune with such societal changes, this court has to intervene to redress the genuine grievances of the parties concerned”.

“This being an exceptional case, exceptional remedies are to be explored and exceptional reliefs are to be granted,” the court said.

For Zahhad and Ziya, who have been a trans couple since 2020, this marks a watershed moment.

“We had not accepted our daughter’s birth certificate, which marked me as mother and Ziya as father,” Zahhad, who works at a firm in Thiruvananthapuram, says. “We then decided to get it changed into ‘parents’ instead. We wanted to ensure that our daughter does not face any trouble in the future. Besides, the word ‘parent’ is much stronger than ‘father’ and ‘mother’.”

According to Ziya, the decision was made in February 2022, when Zahhad, who was assigned female at birth, paused his journey to become a trans man and opted for motherhood. In February 2023, after their daughter Zabiya was born, Zahhad resumed the gender transition. Meanwhile, Ziya began her own journey as a trans woman.

In February, their daughter Zabiya turned two.

The couple wants Zabiya to call them by their names when she grows up. She currently calls Zahhad pappa (father) and Ziya amma (mother). “Let her call us that for now. She hears the other children calling their parents that. In the future, though, we want her to address us by our names,” Ziya says.

For now, she’s growing up like any little girl. But she would eventually be free to choose what she wants, Ziya says.

“We will not interfere in her identity. She is free to decide after 18,” she says.

In its ruling this week, the high court observed that while enacting the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, 1969 — the law that governs the registration of births and deaths in India — lawmakers had never envisaged such a situation. “The concepts such as transgenders leading a life together as a family as we normally understood, having their own children, getting the names of their children registered under the act etc., were something the lawmakers probably did not anticipate at the time of its enactment. Therefore, these are the changes that occurred in society post [the] enactment of the act, which has got statutory recognition, and also [after] their gender based individual status, identity and rights were upheld by the Supreme Court as well,” the court said.

According to advocate Padma Lakshmi, the first transgender advocate in Kerala who represented the couple in court, when she met them after the birth of their daughter, they were getting trolled online for their stance. “I gave them the confidence to undertake a legal battle to find a remedy,” Padma says.