tangle of rainbows

so on the one hand, yale, it’s cool that you have a lower (tho still nonzero) fee for issuing replacement diplomas under a new name for trans graduates than for cis graduates, but at the same time, that puts you in the position of having to have an Official Policy on who counts as trans, and i’m . . . not sure that’s a position you really want to be in

like what’s really frustrating about the whole name change thing is like, there’s this very facile cover where they can say “well no, look, we don’t have anything against trans people, we just need these documents to match your legal name because otherwise they could be used for fraud” and like, they’re not wrong! there are forms of government id in various parts of this country where having a college transcript and/or diploma can be used as one of several pieces of documentation establishing your name. it is not wildly implausible to imagine someone with fraudulent intent using this kind of backdoor method to establish a name that authorities aren’t tracking or w/e. like, i don’t think it’s super likely, but it’s not like they’re worried that extraterrestrials are gonna be confused by the lack of a paper trail or something. fraud is a thing that happens in the world, and i don’t think that guarding against it is inherently terrible

and like, from a legal standpoint, i have relief available — i can go to court and follow the civil procedure for changing my legal name. only i can’t do that now, because, since i’m leaving in july, the backlog in the la court system means that the latest i could start that process here would be august 2015, and new york’s residency requirements mean i can’t start it there until february 2017. so there’s literally a year and a half long window where i literally can’t do anything about my legal name. but like, any challenge to these policies is going to take so long to work out that i’ll be out of that window and they can just say “lol go to court” and like, i’ll be able to do that and the policy won’t change

and like, that’s a bad system! at least from the point of view of respecting trans identities! i should not have to go thru this much hassle to get a diploma and a transcript with my real name on them. (not to mention how much it costs: filing for a name change in la costs $454, plus ca $90 for the publication notice — which you can skip if you’re changing your gender, but i can’t do that b/c the state doesn’t recognize that my gender exists, which is Another Can Of Worms. (i don’t necessarily know that i want the state to even track people’s genders? idk, i don’t have the legal-system-designing chops to figure out what an Optimal Solution is there.)) like, trusting the state to be a better arbiter of trans identities than trans people ourselves is p clearly transphobic, but yale has this very easy dodge of “we have nothing against trans people, we’re just following the law”, and arguing that the entire legal apparatus around name changes is deeply, if unintentionally, transphobic is . . . an Uphill Battle

and it’s also a thing where like, in Utopia, we wouldn’t assign babies gender, and we wouldn’t aggressively gender names, and the categories of cis and trans wouldn’t really obtain, so like, trying to figure out “how do i want trans name changes handled in Utopia?” is not helpful b/c that wouldn’t be a thing Utopia would have to handle at all

like really what i want to be able to do is to say “look, there is a super established common law right to change your name (in . . . most states); i’m trans and i’ve been using brin solomon as my name for all purposes for a considerable length of time; clearly i have changed my name at common law; could you please update your records to reflect the on-the-ground reality of how i am actually living my life?” and i don’t know how you make a legal system that does that but i feel like it really should be possible

just found out that replacement diplomas in the case of a name change have a little note on the back saying “this diploma was originally issued to [previous name]” and like...

i’m just. so. exhausted about trying to escape my deadname. it is an act of transphobic violence to trust the state over trans individuals as an arbiter of our identities. it is an act of transphobic violence to brand us, inescapably, with our deadnames for life.

names do not have ontological inertia. a name is a pointer, a flag, a tool for identifying a person as a continuous entity distinct from other persons. and like, fair, even tho i had already stopped using my deadname among people i was out to when i graduated, i wasn’t out to the wider world, and i didn’t correct my diploma as originally issued. i’m not faulting the yale bureaucracy for that. but that marker, that symbol that points to me is incorrect. there is a different symbol now, tho i remain the same person. to insist that any replacement diploma i get that corrects this error bear an indication of my deadname is to maintain that, in some sense, my deadname has an existence and a lasting significance over and above its use as a signal that points to me, that i am not fully Brin Rose Solomon but instead have some small core that is my deadname, that it wasn’t really me who earned this diploma, but someone else, and i have merely taken that person’s place

no. i did this. me. and i am Brin Rose Solomon. that is my name. i refuse to let this university tell the world otherwise

thinking about the re-naming of commons at yale and i feel like it’s just such a massive metaphor for the current economic climate both wrt higher education but also more generally. like they’re literally taking a building that was called commons and was (kind of, sort of, especially before they ditched dinner) a common place and rebranding it with the name of a rich capitalist like talk about the symbolism here of dismantling a public good and sweeping those needs into the hands of private wealthy individuals who may well have their own agendas it’s like literally a sign of privatization

i swear, by my pretty floral bonnet...