Name Changes Made Easier In California

Sometimes it's hard to believe that four years have already passed since my gender reassignment surgery.  It's even more difficult to wrap my head around the fact that I began to live and work full-time as a woman ten years ago last month.

Two months before embarking on my current life, I changed my name.  Actually, I applied in June, and the process took almost a month.  It actually wasn't as difficult as I expected, in part because of the help I received from Lambda Legal. Still, there was at least one anxious moment for me.

Here in New York, as in most places, the law requires that the name change be published in the legal notices section of a newspaper.  In New York, that newspaper must have a circulation of 100,000 or more.  I'd heard that some judges allowed publication in the Irish Echo or other ethnic newspapers.  I hoped that I could do the same:  Somehow I didn't think readers of such newspapers looked at the legal notices.  Besides, few if any readers of those papers would know me.  

Also:  It's less expensive to publish in those papers than in, say, the New York Times.

I didn't get to publish in the Echo or the Il Gazzetto or any of those papers.  But I got what was probably the next-best thing:  I was ordered to publish my announcement in the Village Voice.  Not as many people read the its legal notices as those of the Times  or even the Daily News, and it's less expensive to publish in the Voice than in either of those. 

Even though I experienced no negative repercussions of publishing my name change, I know that other trans people have.  Essentially, they're "outed" to all sorts of people who are, shall we say, not very understanding.  Also, being so "outed" can make it more difficult to gain--and easier to lose-- employment and housing.

So, I applaud California Governor Jerry Brown for signing a bill that would allow a trans person to change the name on his or her birth certificate without getting a hearing in open court or publishing the request in a newspaper.  Only a doctor's note indicating that the person has undergone a gender transition is necessary.  

This law helps trans people in California in another way:  Court-ordered name changes are necessary in order to change a person's name on a drivers' license and other legal documents.  Also, a trans person needs only a doctor's note indicating that a gender transition has occurred in order to change the gender marker on his or her birth certificate.

Now, I hope the Governors of New York and other states will sign similar bills into law so that law-abiding trans people (the vast majority of us) do not need to fear for our safety and well-being when we undertake the changes we need in order to live with integrity and dignity.

 

What AB 1266 Really Means

I can just hear the bloviators at Faux News now...

Governor Jerry Brown has just signed AB 1266 into law.  It means that transgender students will now be a "protected class."

It seems that any time a new law to protect trans people is passed, discussion goes into the toilet.  I mean, literally: Somehow, it always ends up being about the bathrooms.

So, to hear the right-wing sages, a kid could just one day decide he wants to be a girl--or she wants to be a boy--and use the bathroom he or she "chooses".

Let me tell you:  It doesn't work that way.  I know of no boy who wakes up one day and decides he's a girl--or any girl who begins a new day by trying on the guy thing.  If anything, 99 percent of boys don't want, in any way, to be perceived as feminine (as they understand it), much less as girls.  Even kids like the one I was will  do whatever we can to avoid hearing that we run, throw, kick or do anything else "like a girl." 

Girls, on the other hand, are less anxious about being perceived as boyish.  Still, not many--if any at all--ever "decide" to be boys.

Those of us born with male bodies do not merely "believe" we are female or choose to be so; we know that is what lies at the essence of our beings.  The same can be said for male beings born into female bodies.  

AB 1266 is not about allowing kids to use "whatever bathroom they want."  It's instead a way of fostering an environment in which a kid can actually learn about who he or she is, and to be given the means (which others will also be given) of understanding it.

When I was growing up, neither I nor any other kid--nor, for that matter, most of the adults--had the means of understanding--the language, if you will--gender identity and expression.  One of my earliest school memories is of a hall monitor telling the boys to stand on one line and the girls on the other.  If you're reading this, you know which line I stood on, and you can imagine what the consequences were. Telling that monitor--or, most likely, any teacher or the principal in that school--that I was indeed a girl was met by incomprehension, as if I'd spoken a dialect they'd never before heard, or hostility toward what they perceived as my insubordination.

What's really frightening for me to realize is that, in spite of my isolation and the alienation it would engender, I probably had an easier time than other kids with my predicament.  What I hope is that AB 1266 and other initiatives will help to ensure that kids growing up today won't have similar experiences.