My name is the name I use

About four years ago, the state court granted my petition to change my name. I remember how happy I felt, especially because the final court hearing came after last-minute delays. But now, I finally had my first state-issued document, with multiple stamps, that showed my new name – not a 'preferred' name, but my name, the one I chose, with no qualifiers. Anna.

For reasons that made sense to me at the time, I had only requested to change my first name, but not the surname I'd had from birth. Those reasons stopped making sense to me very soon after that, but now I felt stuck.

§Who the heck is Anya Hope?

Paradoxically, it had almost always been my last name that I wanted to change, ever since I was a kid - before I knew the phrase 'gender identity'. I wasn't a fan of it when I was a kid in Russia, and became even less of a fan as I kept hearing English speakers around me butcher it, sometimes in extremely creative ways.¹ Growing up, I'd 'tried on' several other options, but none ever stuck (which was, in part, why I didn't request one in my petition). Until Hope.

Hope is not the last name on my ID. But, for several years now, I have been using Anna Hope as my de-facto full name. It started with me using it as a stage name when I did stand-up open mics. I liked how it sounded, and that the average English speaker wouldn't find it difficult to pronounce, spell, or understand.

People who knew me from my open mic days were the first people to know me only as Anna Hope. I didn't need to explain it to anyone, or prove anything. With them, it was just my name.

It gradually went on from there. Over time, I started using 'Anna Hope' in more and more situations. A turning point was when, at my previous job, I switched to using Anna Hope as my full name in my email address, work messenger, and other places where it didn’t matter what I had on my ID. I'd asked, and the company agreed, and even apologized they couldn't change my name with payroll. From then, I started using it in all contexts where I get a choice – which is almost everywhere that isn't the government or some bank.

I felt like 'Anna Hope' fit me better overall, but would sometimes get sad that only my Russian friends and family called me Anya (the diminutive of Anna). So, several months ago I started asking my English-speaking friends to call me that, too. In that way, the Russian part of my name wouldn't be completely lost even if no one around me spoke Russian.

I was now going by Anna Hope professionally, and by Anya Hope with friends. But though I wanted at least the former to be reflected everywhere, I kept putting off filing a new petition to change my surname with the state. Aside from the significant cost, the last time I went through that process, the various bits of paperwork (beyond the court filings themselves) kept chasing me for years - because, fun fact, getting a court order with a name change doesn't automatically make the government or businesses or anyone else who think they 'own' my name start using that new legal name (which created a legal paradox, whereby a state court ordered my name to be changed, but de-facto the rest of the government kept using the old one until I went through the extra steps of convincing them that they should stop).

I had sort of, kind of been planning to file a petition in court again, but felt increasingly frustrated that I would need to repeat that onerous, expensive process, just for the ‘privilege’ of the government agreeing with me that my name — the name that everyone I care about, and everyone who cares about me, already knows to be my name — is indeed my name. 

§Why I thought I needed to go through this process

I recently talked to a close friend, who introduced me to the concept of administrative violence, coined (I believe) by Dean Spade in his book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. The book is still on my list (which is a generous way of saying I haven't read it), but as I understand it, much of it revolves around the way trans activists have sought to gain public legitimacy for our community. Specifically, many trans folks have tried to follow the footsteps of gay and lesbian organizations, in that they strived to have our existence be recognized as legitimate by the state, by going through the state's legal institutions.

But those institutions were not set up to aid us. While they do observe some process, they also force us to prove our legitimacy to them, again and again, while employing uniquely vicious attempts to delegitimize and dehumanize us along the way. And any de-jure legitimacy that those institutions may eventually confer on us may be tenuous and conditional at best.

Many of us (including me, not too long ago) have felt that for our names and genders and personhoods to be recognized and upheld by the world at large, we have to appeal to the 'right' people, who are wielding the tools of the state at the right time, and push them to say the right things and enact the right rules, so that we may get the recognition we seek. But if that recognition can be yanked away when the tools of the state get passed to the 'wrong' people – or when the 'right' people, in the course of chasing higher numbers in a key media market, decide to throw us under the bus² – maybe it's not the 'right' or 'wrong' people wielding those tools that are at issue. Maybe it's that those tools, which can be used to confer legitimacy one day and deny it the next, are there to be wielded by anyone at all.

While we can try to win recognition and legitimacy using the tools of the state, the state can always move goal posts, change rules mid-game, or just plain do takesies-backsies after we supposedly prevail through bureaucratic means. We've already seen that happen in some parts of the US, where government institutions have been threatening to revoke trans people's IDs, which those trans people changed by following the process set up by those governments to begin with. And we will likely see more aggressive attempts to roll back our legal recognition once people who are openly hostile to our existence take over the federal government (some people are literally betting on it).

When the institutions of the state don't feel like honoring their own rules and precedent, what other institutions of the state can truly stop them? By what means?

To paraphrase my friend's words, the state is not there to help us feel legitimate. The state has other goals.

§Why the state requires us to go through this process

Another friend recently sent me a video analysis of Seeing Like a State. I haven't read the book, either (it's been on my list for a while), but I found the video very informative. Some parts hit close to home for me, such as the one where the presenter brought up the section of the book about names.

Historically, many societies did not (and some, I believe, still don't) consider names to be a person's rigid identifier. People around the world have gone by multiple different names throughout their lives, depending on the social context they were in (we still sort of have that with nicknames, online handles, and other 'informal' identifiers). 'Legal' names of the form First Last, assumed to be largely immutable (which remains a falsehood some programmers believe in), weren't really a thing.

That variability of names made it hard for emerging states to figure out who lived where, and who a particular person might be associated with, so gradually, in fits and starts, bureaucracies imposed what we now think of as legal names (including surnames) on the populations they wanted to keep track of. At the time, people in those populations didn't always see that as something that was obvious, necessary, or beneficial – and sometimes revolted (for good reason, it seems: "surnames were associated with tax collection, military service, forced labour and other 'obligations' to the feudal lords."). But by the modern era, the governments had largely won, and surnames stuck.³

§What does the state's process have to do with me?

As these conversations churned in my head, I came to believe that the state's interest in my name is not aligned with my own, and that their interest might even conflict with mine. What I want is for people in my life - my friends, people I love, people I collaborate with - to be able to associate a name with me as a human person. The fun thing is that they already do. I didn't need to file any paperwork with anyone who cares about me as a person for them to refer to me as Anya (aka Anna) Hope - for those who knew me under different names, I had to just be, like, FYI, this is the name I use now, and the response (most recently a few days ago, with a friend I hadn't spoken to in a while) has been more or less 'Oh, thanks for letting me know!' And people who met me more recently, and who didn't know me under any other names certainly didn't ask for any paperwork to prove that my name is my name.⁴

But the state, and various other authorities, wants a rigid identifier, so that they have an easier time, uh, administering me. So I am trying to no longer care what name they use. I admit, I can't help feeling a bit peeved when some governmental or quasi-governmental institution continues to use what neither I nor most people in my life consider to be my name. But I no longer want to feel that that is a me problem. It is, logically, on them, because it should be in their interest to have the most up to date information about me. My name is ultimately just a pointer to me as a person. If they want to chase a bunch of pointers, they can spend their own cycles doing that.⁵

§Whose name is it, anyway?

I don't fault any of my trans siblings for trying to go through the state process. For everyone who is doing so, I wish for every step to cause the least friction, and prove as painless and accessible as it could be. But I, personally, no longer recognize the state, or any institution, to have any authority over my name.

Even if I change my name, and my ID, and my passport, and everything else, again, I know that if the institutions of the state want to deny me legitimacy, they will find ways of doing that, regardless of the heaps of paperwork I might try to throw at them. Paperwork, and bureaucracy, and courts – those are their tools, that they use to put us in our place, and we cannot liberate ourselves by using their tools.

I don't feel like going through all that bureaucratic effort, again, just to be disappointed, again, when years later, some companies continue to send me junk mail addressed to a name I no longer use, because they bought my outdated information off some data broker. And I sure as heck don't want to update my name with data brokers! Instead, I want to deny the legitimacy to the idea that someone else, whose goals do not align with mine, knows what my name is better than I do. Let them chase pointers.

I am Anya (and sometimes Anna) Hope. That is not the full 'name' on my ID, but it is my name to me, my friends, and anyone who cares about me enough to not require my ID to believe that my name is my name. As a corollary, this means that anyone who believes what is written on my ID over what I tell them is not my friend.

It sure would be nice, though, if I never had to think about what they believe about me at all. But at least I might know who they are, upfront.

Thanks to Hera, Erika, Sage and Mikayla for giving me feedback on drafts of this piece. The views I expressed in the final text are my own.

§Footnotes