One of the best parts of my transition process was going to court to change my name and gender on my birth certificate and subsequently my drivers license to match my chosen name and gender. That being said, this has also become one of the worst parts of my transition process. Going to court itself was made relatively painless thanks to a wonderful attorney (Susan Fox Jacobsen) as I documented in a blog post HERE.
However, going to court and getting the court orders was the easy part of things. Since walking out of court that day with my name change in hand and then getting the gender change order a few weeks later, it's been a seemingly never-ending process to update my information. Don't get me wrong, I didn't expect it to be quick or easy; but I also didn't give enough thought to just how many places I would need to update.
The first change was the DMV. Now, when I got the name change court order it was a Friday and I had to go out of town that Sunday and wouldn't return until late the following Wednesday so I didn't get to the DMV until that Thursday. As I only had the name change order in hand at that point I went in there presenting as a male still with the court order. The process itself ending up taking about far longer than it should have as there were typos on my court order. For both my given name and my new name the first and middle names were transposed all the way through the court order. Now the judge caught the issue while in court, but she simply had the attorney make the changes to the order with her pen and then she signed it. Now if that's good enough for the judge, you'd think it would be good enough for anyone else, especially since I have a certified copy of the order; but the DMV ended up making an issue over it. Three or four different people read the entire court order word for word before somebody finally approved the change. I honestly thought I was going to have to call my lawyer and have the court issue a corrected order, but thankfully it didn't come to that. Once the DMV supervisor gave her approval the rest of the process was quick.
The next change I decided to make was at my bank. I have joint check and savings accounts with M from when we were married - they are basically "household accounts" where bills are paid from and such; but I also have my own account and I wanted to get J onto that anyway. The bank was a fairly painless experience, although per their own website all I should have needed was my documentation which I had, but I went ahead and drug M along since we were going to lunch and in hindsight it was probably a good thing as they seemed more comfortable changing things with her there - although I'm not really sure why.
My next change did not occur until late March when my license was able to be renewed (six months early). At that point I had the gender change order in hand as well and headed back to the DMV as Madison along with J. That visit is semi-detailed HERE. Long story short, the visit was fairly painless this time, although I did note that they physically scanned in a copy of this court order. Part of me was a bit surprised as I would have thought that a name change was a bigger deal when a simple M to F under Gender, but what do I know?
At that point I figured I was in pretty good shape, after all my old first name is my new middle name so I figured that would minimize any issues going forward; however, the last couple of months it started to bother me that so many things were still in my old name so I've set out to get them all changed. This is where things have gotten tedious. The changes I had already made were all simple in that I could go do them in person which always seems to make things quick. The changes I'm making now aren't as simple.
So far those have ranged from fairly painless - "Netflix" being the easiest as I was able to accomplish the change via online chat in less than five minutes. Others such as ESPN are being less cooperative and I'm probably going to cancel my Insider account over it. Then there are things such as credit cards, the one I just did requires a copy of the court order and a copy of my new license to be mailed to them. Why I couldn't email or fax them what they need is beyond me, but whatever. We haven't even gotten as far as the cars - they're both paid off so I'm not as worried about those - or the house (I'm dreading what that is going to entail). Insurance was fairly simple both health and home/auto. In the former, J was able to handle that since I'm currently on her insurance (hers has better life insurance than my own did); in the latter that wasn't a big deal either as M switched us from one company to another so we started clean with them with me as Madison.
There are still other things I need to get to, for example I'd like to transfer all of my Google Play stuff over to my new email account, but apparently as things sit today that is not even possible. I've got two more credit cards to change, but I need to go get more certified copies of my court order for those. A couple of utilities are still in my name such as DirecTV. Not to mention my passport, although I'm going back and forth on if I'm going to touch that. I didn't pay for it initially, work did, and as such I'm not sure I want to update it. I suppose if I were to pursue SRS via Dr. Brassard in Canada then I'd need to, but as of now he's a second, possibly third option, so unless it comes down to that I'll probably not worry about this.
I suppose none of this has been "hard", it's just tedious and I really dislike tedious tasks. And frankly, some companies (ESPN that means you) are making this harder than it should be. But I guess I really shouldn't complain and just be happy that I was able go get things changed legally so I can go about all of these other changes. :)
- M
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