Aurora Arboralis

I sent off the paperwork this week to change my name.  So of course that leads to a meditation on Identity and the social regulation of same.  A perfect example of the Sociological examination of the relationship between individual agency and social structure, between social stability and social change.  The Personal meets the Political, and what a fraught encounter it turns out to be!

I actually changed my last name after my marriage ended in 1999.  I refuse to use the term ‘surname’ since I read an etymology that claimed it was derived from ‘sire name’ – whether that means one’s male progenitor or hereditary ruler (or both) the term offends both my feminist and my republican sensibilities.  Mind you, ‘last name’ is not ideal either because of its Eurocentrism – lots of people have this name occurring first not last.  Perhaps ‘family name’ would be a more accurate description, although that is also fraught, for reasons I will explore later.

Anyway, single once more, the usual alternatives of retaining my husband’s last name or returning to my father’s last name were equally repugnant.  Clearly time to celebrate the matriarchy rather than the patriarchy.  Except that I realised that my mother’s maiden name was her sire’s name, so that would merely be pushing the patriarchy back a generation.  Eventually I decided on Kentlyn because my mother’s name was Lynn, and she was born in Kent .  I thought Kentlyn looked nice on the page, which is important.  And it is unique – no other people I know of share that last name, although I later discovered there is a suburb in Sydney called Kentlyn.

Mum was flattered by my choice of name in her low key, understated British way, though a little mystified by the whole concept of making up your own name.  I have since discovered that people can be very disturbed and even hostile to the idea that a person would want to do exactly that.  The most common question that arises is whether my father was insulted.  He was already dead but even had he still been living that would have cut no ice with me; it was my profound dislike for the man and his name that led me to change my name at marriage and not want to return to it after the marriage ended.  It’s funny how no-one wonders if a woman changing her name on marriage is offensive to her father.  I’ll just leave that one there for you to mull over . . .

I suspect the subtext, what really disturbs people about the idea of changing one’s name, is the mutability of identity, especially in regard to kinship.  In a society of universal and accelerating change, some people like to cling to the idea of several fundamentally immutable aspects of personhood.  I would assert that almost no-one in Australia expects to spend their lives in the same place, doing the same job or having the same profession/vocation, practicing the religion of their parents, having the same friends, voting for the same political party, eating the same food, playing (or even watching) the same sports, wearing the same clothes, or being married to the same partner.  Many aspire to a life-long partnership but the rates of cohabitation and divorce show we value self-determination and individual happiness more.

Yet there remain some characteristics that many see as fixed and immutable, and whose immutability provides some comfort in a constantly changing world.  Sex/Gender for one.  Date and place of birth.  Your place in the fixed network of kin relations, especially who your parents are.  Incidentally, I can’t begin to tell you the number of women I have spoken to who take or keep their husband’s last name because they want to have the same last name as their children on the Medicare card.  This idea of all having the same name is incredibly powerful, and seems to me to speak to the yearning for coherence, belonging, stability, security, in intimate relationships and family life.  Exacerbated, no doubt, by the demonisation of women who have several children by different fathers on TV so-called Current Affairs programs – quelle horreur!

These apparently immutable aspects of personal identity all appear on your birth certificate, which is the gold standard for recording, and fixing, your identity, and are reiterated in the endless stream of documents and online forms that seek to establish that you are who you say you are.  Just think – how many times have you been asked recently by an online form for your mother’s maiden name?  Doing the paperwork for my change of name has brought all this to front of mind, but  I’ll save my thoughts on the bureaucratic regulation of identity for another post.

The change of last name was accomplished by deed poll, which was surprisingly simple in 1999 – fill in the paperwork, head down to the supreme court, pay your $49, and be issued with a deceptively simple looking document with a couple of official-looking stamps and a signature.  Then the foot-slog of doing the rounds of government instrumentalities, businesses and organisations that must be informed.  I did this with even more delight than when I married, conscious that I was creating a self-chosen identity, in no way contingent upon my relationship with any other person living or dead.  This proved to be a surprisingly powerful, and empowering, process.

But the ‘given’ names (given at birth by one’s parents), the Christian names (confirmed at christening or infant baptism, or these days sometimes some kind of naming ceremony) remained – Susan Jane.  These seem even more personal than the family name, I guess because they’re not shared with other family members – they distinguish you from those who share that last name, whether your biological kin or not .  The first name especially is the name by which everyone knows you, has always known you, the name by which they think about you when you’re not present.  It seems to partake of your very essence, to be an expression of your essential ‘you-ness’.   And yet these names are given to you often before birth, and certainly before anyone has the slightest inkling of what kind of person you will turn out to be.  Sometimes they’re even a kind of tribute to someone or something else – a relative or family friend, a saint, a family tradition, an event or a fashion – witness the proliferation of the name ‘Wendy’ after the play Peter Pan was staged!  That most personal of personal attributes, the first name/s, may have no fit at all with how you understand yourself and your place in the world.

Indeed many people go by names other than those which appear on their birth certificate, which tends to involve endless explanations, justifications, negotiations, confusion, and discomfort on an almost daily basis.  And sometimes this happens selectively – I think of a friend who is ‘Becky’ only to a handful of intimates, ‘Rebecca’ to everyone else, and her husband keeps getting into strife for introducing her to strangers as ‘Becky’ because that’s how he habitually thinks of her.  And then there are nicknames.  Interestingly, all of these may change over the life course.  How many of us have abandoned nicknames given to us in childhood, have acquired new nicknames which are used in some social settings but not in others (e.g. immediate family, workplace, etc) or who use different forms of our given name at different periods of our lives or in different social settings?

Personal names are also deeply imbricated with gender; they are one of the first indicators of a person’s gender, and there are only a few personal names in English that are gender-neutral (e.g. Kerry, Jordan) though usually their spelling will indicate gender even when their pronunciation is the same; e.g. Francis/Frances, Jesse/Jessie, Leslie/Lesley.  There’s lots of research evidence to show that people rate job applicants with identical resumes more highly with a male name, less highly with a female name.  Yes Virginia, Gender Still Matters.

So when a person embarks on a gender transition, the issue of names will be one of the first to arise.  I love talking to trans people and hearing the story of their name.  Many will try several different names before they find one that they’re comfortable with.

I decided on ‘Sujay’, a boy’s name of Hindi and Sanskrit origin that means ‘good triumph’.  I like it because as an Indian name, it’s not obviously masculine to most English-speakers and, as a genderqueer person, I like that ambiguity.  But it also seems to me to combine my original given names: Susan Jane.  I like to think I’m bringing my previous female identity on the journey with me, not casting it off entirely – which I don’t think is actually possible anyway.  The trajectory of my gender identity is not one of ‘wrong’ to ‘right, but of gradual unfolding, development, elaboration, evolution.

Because I moved to Sydney a couple of years ago, most of the people in my social world have been introduced to me as Sujay and so have only ever known me by that name.  It’s only when I go back to Brisbane where some people, mostly family, continue to call me Sue, that I realise how alienated I have actually become from that name.  How it jars!  Funnily enough, my octogenarian aunt in Perth has enthusiastically embraced my new name; it’s my nearest and dearest who seem to have the most difficulty with it.

So when I got back from hols I decided to bite the bullet and do the paperwork to change my name legally.  Some may still choose not to use it, but at least they won’t be able to justify that by saying it’s not my real name.  These days, changing your name by deed poll is no longer an option.  You have to fill in a complex form and send it to the registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in the state of your birth, along with a fat fee and a personal Credit Report showing all the names you have ever used (more on this in my next post).

I hadn’t anticipated it, but the prospect of having a new birth certificate issued in the name Sujay Kentlyn hit me like a ton of bricks.  I feel like I’m asserting in the face of family prejudice and social strictures, historical precedent and bureaucratic regulation, the policing of identity in general and gender in particular – this is who I am, autonomous and self-determined, and now you must recognise me as such.  I never imagined it would feel so good.