I wonder if there was less stigma around transitioning and gender issues if that would lessen the problem of deadnames for affected individuals?
Which doesn’t solve the problem now, but maybe would lessen it in the future?
I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say here unless you’re confusing mitochondrial DNA with y-chromosome testing. Any person will have the mtDNA of their biological mother, and since it’s not linked to their gender in any way they can just have it tested and it will show what ancient matrilinear branch of humanity they are connected to.
If you don’t have a Y-chromosome and want to know your Y-DNA haplogroup you will have to convince a relative of the same patrilinear line to test themselves. For ancient family history purposes such as these there’d be little harm in sending that relative’s sample in as your own, but for any tests looking at other genetic markers you would be violating that relatives privacy, and it might be illegal.
I’m Australian, and in my state there is a field on birth certificates for siblings. My name and age at the at the time of his birth are on my brother’s birth certificate (and are technically inaccurate as I wouldn’t have turned 3 for another month). My great grandfather was born in 1883, and the ten children of his father’s previous marriage are crammed into that little box (the ten children of his mother’s previous marriage were omitted, presumably due to lack of space).
Sorry, I mixed up the two. :smack: I meant it the other way around. Thanks for catching that.
It would lessen it for some of us. But remember, even for those of us (very few) who would see no external stigma, we also have an internal struggle as well. Even for someone like me, who has had pretty much 100% acceptance and support, even seeing my old name/gender on documents I come across, well, hurts.
This is an issue that I have no personal experience of, so maybe I’m just hopelessly naive. However, what do you do with something like health or employment records? The documents show that Mary Smith was immunized against smallpox, measles, and polio on certain dates; the HR records of my company reflect that Mary Smith worked here from this date to that date doing X job. You probably don’t want to abandon previous health records or employment, but it’s not my obligation to alter those records (depending on exactly what they are, it may not be legally possible to alter those records), and that doesn’t change whether Mary Smith is now Mary Carter or John Jones. Where is the balance point?
When you transition you do get the name changed on all kinds of records, academic, employment, medical, etc., as much as possible. Or at least you can politely request record keepers to do so, and I’ve never gotten a refusal.
I won’t care if anybody unseals my gender history after I’m dead. But while I live, I’d like a little privacy, please.
Meh, I can understand why a lot of transpeople balk at the idea of EVER being referred to by their birth name. And certainly, in MOST contexts I’d hate it. There are real dangers towards people discovering your old identity (if you pass). Honestly most of it is societal more than a “trans thing”; if being trans was accepted and okay, transpeople would probably not care nearly as much about their old name never being discovered.
Personally, though, I think it’s stupid to go as far as to scrub all mention of your birth gender from historical and genealogical records. That’s overzealous and it can be important for tracing lineage and historical facts. I mean, it should probably go in a note, and their real name should be listed as their name on the record, but I think this is an area where historical interest trumps sensitivity to a person’s feelings.
It doesn’t come up that much. You change whatever you can but some things you cannot.
I changed about 150 places where my name and gender were legally or otherwise recorded. But some things it was impossible to change. I just had to accept that. In my case while I had passing privilege and could have gone “deep stealth,” to do so meant walking away from my entire academic and work career, and that wasn’t something I was willing to do. Plus I decided to become an activist which means I’m out and in the media on a regular basis.
I guess that’s your opinion.
My opinion is that contrary to what genealogists think, they do not have any “right” to the birth information of a transgender person. The fact that they can acquire it legally in no way means we are obligated to retain everything immutable in the records. Their “historical interest” really doesn’t trump our personal feelings (read: psychological and physical well-being), and they need to understand the moral responsibility to minimize data exposure.
I don’t know of any geneology program that doesn’t automatically block sharing information about living people.
It’s not some random genealogists; it’s family (that’s almost always who is doing the research anyway). Does the family of a transgender person have the right to know who this person is, where they came from or where they went, etc.? If you are an island unto yourself, maybe, but as soon as you start forming relationships with other people, those other people start thinking they are entitled to have some information.
If you change/destroy all of the records while you’re alive, then when you’re dead and gone, there is no chance of “unsealing” anything. Being able to unseal means that there has to be a record somewhere that Person X used to be Person Y, but I understand Una Persson to be arguing that ideally this linking record should not exist at all, that there should be just an absolute break with no connection between the two.
In any relationship you’re “entitled” to exactly what information someone chooses to provide or what is legally available, I guess. Otherwise, no.
I’m saying that there is no moral obligation of a transgender person to proactively provide nor retain that information on the record.
And as far as family goes, given that the majority of transgender persons are ostracized by many (and in some cases, all) of their families…family doesn’t mean quite as much as it does for other people.
I’m simply saying that any person should have the right to correct their name and gender marker on official documents if they so choose, and they should not be under any moral obligation to maintain those prior records.
The problem of being unable to obtain proper identification documents is real and opens us up to abuse, everything from procedural to emotional to physical. As in many cases the basis for proper identification documents is the birth certificate, changing the birth certificate is mandatory in many states. A genealogist who thinks that transgender persons should be not allowed to correct their identity documents either has no understanding of our reality, or has no human compassion towards us.
“I have a right to enter your birth name into my software program” does not compare with “I have a right to have a drivers license that properly identifies me so I don’t get abused and open myself up to criminal activity, let alone allows me to feel good about myself and my societal identity.”
I can appreciate and respect any concern that some living person may have about being “outed” … that some and maybe most trans-people would rather not others know that they used to be considered a different gender and referred to by a different name.
And I can also appreciate that history does not change in order to respect what people want remembered about them. It’s a “deadname”? History is full of 'em.
This goes beyond trans issues. There was a person born whose given name was Cassius Clay, who embraced a different religion than the one he was born into and decided at age 22 to change his name, calling Cassius Clay his “slave name” with his new identity a part of his activism. Pretending that he was always referred to Muhammad Ali and erasing the previous name from the historical record? It seems like an Orwellian view of history: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” It was Cassius Clay who was enrolled in Kindergarten in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was Muhammad Ali who refused to be drafted. No, Ali should not have had the right to go back and change the name on his Kindergarten records if he had so wanted because his slave name offended him.
Okay, a family tree is often just a recreational hobby and respecting it as serious history may be a stretch and outweighed by respect for a specific trans-person’s sensitivity to being open about how they were previously identified.
But sometimes these things are used for medical purposes too and in those cases genetic counselors and other health professionals really should be able to expect accurate information, or at least as accurate as is possible. “Born with apparent gender (male or female)” can be important in those contexts.
I’m just not sure how to respond 100% delicately to this. I am trying, but I apologize if I cause offense.
The problem is that this is not just about some software program. It’s about history. It’s about the legacy of humanity itself. It’s about truth and fighting ignorance. It’s about principles that go beyond one single person.
That’s not to invalidate everything you’ve said. That principle of allowing what are technically lies due to the outright dangerous bigotry trans folk face is enshrined in how we deal with trans rights, and I am not at all trying to take that away. Trans people have the right to change these historical records, just like they have the right to never admit they were born a certain gender or had a different name.
But I think it is unfair to belittle these other people’s concerns.
I also think you guys suffer from a dearth of imagination and creativity. The issue is before death. There’s no reason you can’t scrub every public record, keeping the trans person safe, while also making sure that history gets the full story after their death.
You could put the information is a safe that is only revealed in a will. You could set up some sort of software program you have to check in on or the information leaks.
Or, far more practically, you can have a trusted person in your life who can reveal the information after you are dead. No bigotry in life, but then, like Johanna says is okay, you can update the genealogical record after death.
The beauty of having genealogists now is that you don’t have to search through tons of records to piece things together. You can just keep a running genealogy, and that can be the only place where the change is noted.
Back in the early 1700s, people from Navarre, Alava and Guipuzcoa were forced by the King to send lawyers to distant Barcelona (hey, remember, this was when you could arrive to your inn for the night with either your ass hurting or your feet hurting) to build up genealogical records for the last 300 years. Those families which were able to get them completed have kept careful genealogies since and these do include name changes, with the original listed in parenthesis; note that calling someone by a form of their name that they have told you not to use, or by their old name when there is a new one was considered a deadly offense here way before anybody had heard of transgenders. With that kind of background, for me it is difficult to understand denying to your descendants that bridge which links them to centuries of history.
30 years ago, the Spanish government decided they would remove “connecting particles” from names and lastnames in order to be able to write our names in shorter computer fields. Names, we accepted, as it matched long custom. But lastnames, they had so many suits and such a bad backlash (the most famous radio voice of the time, Luis del Olmo, wasn’t happy to hear he was now “Luis Olmo”) that they dropped it. Lastnames kept their connectors, mister del Olmo stayed mister del Olmo.
You don’t want to be called by a name not your own? Neither do I, and while I’m not transgender it does happen! Time and again; some of my current coworkers still haven’t written my name correctly a single time for political reasons, and that level of aggresive disrespect is one of the reasons I’ve been looking for another gig. I ended up getting an official name change so it would be easier to push the form of my name I want people to use, because My Name Is Not María Damnit (and now people can’t even point at my ID and claim that it is - btw, it never was, damnit). Or Mar I Luz. Or MariLuz. Or Marylis. Or… But while my parents didn’t spell my name the way I do now, they did give me a name. People get called “the wrong name” all the time, not only those who are transgender. And we have to push against misnaming all the time. But “dealing with jerks” is one thing, “dealing with history” is another.
Please tell Ohio that, damn them. Of all the mistakes I’ve made in life, being born in Ohio was surely the worst.
Birth certificates aside, when we get the legal name change it’s of course a matter of public record. Anybody could go to the county courthouse and look me up if they had a mind to.
Una Persson is an illustrious sheroe for all of her great work, yet she chooses to openly identify as trans, taking one for the team, which only adds to her sheroism—but here we see how zealously she’ll defend the right to privacy of anyone who doesn’t so choose. I do not volunteer my gender history to anyone for any reason, because I have no reason to do so and that’s that. If anybody does catch on that I’m trans, I don’t get upset, I just shrug and file it in the Thousand Mortal Ills to Which Flesh is Heir Dept.
Well I don’t know. I was adopted at birth, and at some later date I got a birth certificate. As far as I know it is correct as to all the particulars of time, place, birth weight. But it looks like I was naturally born to the parents who adopted me, and there is nothing on there to indicate anything else. So some of the facts (I almost said “true facts”) of my birth have been obliterated.
Now there is also a sealed copy somewhere, listing two other people, or anyway one other person, as my parent. This one would say everything the one I have says, except for my name and the name of my parents.
But short of unsealing the thing, there is no way that anyone can prove I wasn’t born to these people.
Now, states are different. I guess some states indicate, some way or another, if the person on the birth certficiate was adopted–I don’t know. I’m just suggesting that there is some wiggle room here. They can change the records if they want to. I doubt that I’m going down in the Great Record Book of the Mormon Church as a child of my birth parents and 500 years from now it’s not going to matter to anyone anyhow.
Saying their concerns are less important than other people’s concerns is not really belittling them. They may not really be able to appreciate this from the standpoint of a transgender person.
I prefaced in this thread with saying as a historian I encounter problems myself. I’ve been called “transphobic” for putting the birth name and gender of transgender persons in my historical articles that I write. Sure it may be less than 1% of the people reading it, but I do deal with this issue from both ends of the equation. Even my status as a widely known transgender activist doesn’t give me a pass with everyone to use a historical figure’s “dead name” and birth sex.
To answer a prior point yes I think transgender persons should reveal to their physicians and those treating them medically their complete history. But that information should be compartmentalized. I’ve been the victim of clerical workers at a hospital asking me very loudly “YOU BORN A MAN, RIGHT?” and having every head within 50 feet pivot to look at me. Thankfully because I’m “out and proud” I answered back “I AM A TRANSGENDER WOMAN; THANKS FOR LETTING EVERYONE IN YOUR WAITING ROOM KNOW MY PERSONAL MEDICAL INFORMATION. CAN I SPEAK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR PLEASE?”
I’m also (well, I was) a genealogist. I understand and appreciate the importance of accurate information.
What I’m trying to say is there needs to be some sensitivity here, and some recognition that if one is a genealogist who has a living transgender person in your family tree, one is likely to offend them with dead-naming. At a minimum the information of living persons should be kept private.
Thank you Johanna.