A staff handbook’s family-friendly chapter is where a trans man, a non-binary parent or an intersex employee first finds out whether an organisation’s inclusion reaches the pages that describe their own life. Maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental and antenatal leave are written, almost everywhere, on one assumption: that the person giving birth is a woman and the person supporting her is a man.
The law does not make that assumption. It uses gendered words, and it defines who is entitled in functional terms. Once you see the difference, the drafting problem is small and the fix does not touch a single entitlement.
What the statute actually says
Start with the right to accompany someone to an antenatal appointment. Section 57ZE of the Employment Rights Act 1996 gives the right to an employee who has a “qualifying relationship” with the pregnant woman or her expected child. The relationship is defined in subsection (7), and the second limb is worth quoting in full: “the person, being of a different sex or the same sex, lives with the woman in an enduring family relationship but is not a relative of the woman”. No sex is specified for the accompanying person. A policy that frames this as a right for “the father” or “her husband” is narrower than the Act.
Paternity leave works the same way. Sections 80A and 80B require regulations that entitle an employee who satisfies conditions “as to relationship with a newborn, or expected, child” and “as to relationship with the child’s mother”. The operative conditions sit in the Paternity and Adoption Leave Regulations 2002, and regulation 2 defines the word most handbooks get wrong. A “partner”, in relation to a child’s mother or adopter, “means a person (whether of a different sex or the same sex) who lives with the mother or adopter and the child in an enduring family relationship”. Regulation 4 then admits an employee who is “married to, the civil partner or the partner of the child’s mother, but not the child’s father”. The route in is relationship and responsibility, not a gendered label.
Ordinary parental leave goes further still. Under regulation 13 of the Maternity and Parental Leave etc. Regulations 1999, an employee who “has, or expects to have, responsibility for a child” is entitled to parental leave to care for that child. There is no mother or father in that test at all.
And since 29 December 2025 the Paternity Leave (Bereavement) Act 2024 removes the qualifying period for paternity leave where the child’s mother, or the adopter, dies — again drafted by reference to the person who gave birth or adopted, not to their gender.
What “mother” means when the person who gave birth is a man
The word that anchors maternity leave is “mother”, and here the Court of Appeal has already done the work. In R (McConnell) v Registrar General [2020] EWCA Civ 559, a trans man holding a gender recognition certificate gave birth and asked to be registered as his child’s father or parent. The Court held that the Registrar was correct, applying the ordinary interpretation of section 12 of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, to register him as the mother — and declined to substitute the word “parent”, because “mother” is the term used across the Children Act 1989 and the registration scheme.
Read that carefully, because it is the opposite of an exclusion. The law’s “mother” is the person who was pregnant and gave birth, whatever their legal gender. A trans man who gives birth takes maternity leave under sections 71 to 75, because the entitlement attaches to pregnancy and birth, not to identifying as a woman. The Supreme Court in For Women Scotland [2025] UKSC 16 reads the Equality Act’s pregnancy and maternity provisions the same way: they apply automatically to the person who is pregnant, without any argument about gender reassignment.
So the statutory label is fixed, and the eligibility underneath it is functional. That is precisely why a handbook can re-word its own prose. The Act says “she”; your policy can say “the pregnant employee” and “the employee who has given birth” and change nothing about who qualifies.
The review in five checks
When we review a family-friendly chapter we run every provision through the same five questions.
Language. Does the running text default to “mother”, “she”, “women”, “father” and “his partner” as if no other reader exists? Keep the statutory term where you are quoting the Act; in your own explanatory prose, worked examples, forms and manager scripts, speak to the pregnant employee, the employee taking paternity leave, the partner.
Scope. Does the stated scope name only women, or mothers and fathers, as the population covered — or does it say plainly that the provision applies to any employee who meets the eligibility test, regardless of sex, gender reassignment status or gender identity? Silence reads as exclusion even where the underlying test is already neutral.
Eligibility mapping. For each provision, trace the eligibility test back to its statutory source and check the policy states it accurately — neither adding a condition the Act does not impose, such as evidence of a specific relationship type or a gender recognition certificate, nor implying a narrower population than the test covers.
Operational support. Beyond the leave itself, does the practical machinery — return-to-work conversations, breastfeeding or expressing facilities, uniform adjustments, antenatal appointment cover, keeping-in-touch arrangements — assume a particular gender presentation? Facilities framed for the team members who need them serve the same purpose without the exclusion.
Data and confidentiality. Does using the provision ever require disclosing trans status, gender history or a gender recognition certificate? It should not. Where a form collects sex, gender or relationship data to administer a provision, that collection needs its own lawful basis and minimisation discipline.
The gaps we see most
The same handful of gaps appears across sectors. “Women’s issue” framing as the default for menopause, maternity and fertility content. “Mothers and fathers” framing that leaves adoptive, same-sex and trans parents out of the policy’s own language even though the entitlement already covers them. A definition of “partner” quietly narrowed in illustrations, forms or manager scripts to mean a spouse or an opposite-sex partner, when the Regulations do not narrow it. Disclosure made a condition of access, formally or informally. And a family-leave chapter that never cross-refers to the organisation’s standalone trans and non-binary policy or its dignity-at-work policy, so the two say different things.
None of these is a legal question. Every one of them is a drafting and process question, which is why they can be fixed in an afternoon and evidenced properly — the date, the reviewer, the five checks applied, what changed and what was cross-checked.
Where a genuine legal question begins
Two cautions. First, this is decision-support, not legal advice: where a review surfaces a real eligibility question — how “partner” applies to a particular family arrangement, or how a day-one entitlement interacts with an existing qualifying-service rule — that is a question for advice, not for rewording. Second, none of the drafting moves above changes the law’s own vocabulary. The point is narrower and more useful: the words in the statute describe roles, the tests underneath them describe people, and your policy only has to stop narrowing the second back down to the first.