Mother wins Federal Circuit Court battle with father over name son to be called at school A MUM who detests her son's first name - which her estranged partner shares - has won a bizarre court order that he be called something else at school. In what the judge labelled a "truly absurd" situation, it took a two-day hearing to decide the six-year-old must go by another moniker in class. Legal restrictions mean the Herald Sun can refer to the child's given name only as "X," and his alternate name as "Y." The Federal Circuit Court heard the mother finds both the father and his name - which the grandfather and great grandfather on that side also had - "extremely distasteful" and had only ever referred to her son as Y. As the boy prepared to start school in NSW, his dad sought an order that teachers and other pupils should call him X. But at last month's hearing the mother insisted others should call him Y. In a judgment published this week, Judge David Halligan noted the mother's derision for the traditional family name was "gratuitously offensive and highly inflammatory." The judge expressed concern that abandoning the use of the name X in public could reinforce the boy's already negative view of his father. "I am deeply concerned at the potential adverse consequences for the child of the mother's distaste for his own name," he said. This is a truly absurd situation, and casts both parents in an unflattering light. Neither is showing any regard for this child's best interests," the judge said. The mother told the court her son disliked his dad, did not want to spend time with him, disliked his dad's name and thus his own. She claimed at times the child referred to "that stupid name." The mother was so unwilling to accept the child being called X, she had kept him from school over the issue, and had withdrawn him from preschool. The latter happened after the father had successfully persuaded staff there to refer to the child as X, after the father made a formal complaint to administrators. The parents have been fighting over various issues since 2009. The judge issued an interim order that teachers and staff at the school use Y to refer to the child, but stressed the order did not prevent the father or members of his family referring to the child as X.