I don’t like my current legal name. My family didn’t want me to initially masculinize my name to Charles, so I went with “Cai”.
That was 5 years ago. Time and again the regret popped up, and I would try to do something about it. People stole my username when I deactivated some accounts. Others gave me a hard time with changing usernames back and forth. I tried but failed a prior time to legalize my preferred name Charles. I’m just not paying $3k to use the proper form of my name as a .com.
Everywhere you file for a name change is different, whether by country, even by US state. Where I live, it’s easy-ish, just pricey, but the total cost (last time for me it was somewhere north of $750 between legal and notice fees) is broken up between steps. Since courthouses are closed to the general public because of the pandemic, I mailed everything from the local post office.
Funny how it is, using a debit card which bears my former alias, to pay for my new one.
So, in the coming weeks, I can finally pay for each step, and correct this massive, grave error. I still insist on people who elect to transition to choose a new name and legalize it before fully transitioning, as the paperwork will otherwise be a headache with preferred vs dead names. At the very least, if informed consent or gender identity laws are not present in your area, visit a gender therapist who can write that letter for the judge if you choose a name that’s not unisex, to minimize negation of a name change.
And as my name change furthers, I’ll update you.
