A transgender person who gave birth with the help of fertility treatment cannot be registered as the child’s ‘father’, the most senior family judge in England and Wales has ruled. The individual is biologically female but legally male.

In the first legal definition of a mother in English common law, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the high court’s family division, ruled on Wednesday that motherhood was about being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person who does so was considered a man or a woman in law.

Freddy McConnell, 32, went to court after a registrar insisted he be recorded as the baby’s mother on the birth certificate.