Civil status forms, which make it possible to claim an identity card or a passport, will be modified to allow homoparental families to be included from March 2022, Minister Delegate for Citizenship Marlène Schiappa announced on Friday. Concretely, the paper and Web forms necessary for any request for identity papers will no longer automatically carry the mention father and mother.
A checkbox
The applicant will now have “a box to check to specify whether it is the father or the mother”, explained Marlène Schiappa during a ceremony organized in Paris to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Flag association, which federates LGBT police and gendarmes. “This will indicate, when this is the case, that you have two moms or two dads, or that you are two moms and two dads,” continued the minister, ensuring that “allow all families to to be considered is a priority of the government ”.
The update of these forms is due to take effect in March 2022, she announced.
“We welcome this decision that we have been waiting for a long time,” reacted the president of the Association of homoparental families, Alexandre Urwicz. “We simply regret that this change comes in 2022 and that it took eight years to update the forms”, because homoparental adoption is possible since the law on marriage for all in 2013, he recalls.
The Interior Ministry still hadn’t changed anything
According to the ADFH, only a handful of cities like Paris, Strasbourg, Saint-Etienne or Villeurbanne had so far modified their identity card application forms to make them inclusive. The Ministry of the Interior had “not made any adaptation of its administrative forms”, which required “to cross out references to father or mother”, explains Alexandre Urwicz. “It was violent not being able to integrate your own family,” he said. “It is not for the citizen to adapt to the administration to try to fit into boxes, it is for the public service to adapt”.
The solution adopted for the new forms “is the right one to really include everyone”, he stressed. “We didn’t want ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’ labels. “