Mastercard To Allow Trans and Nonbinary People To Use Their Chosen Name On Cards

Innula Zenovka

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In the UK, by way of contrast, there's a well-established route to effecting a legal change of identity, and plans to liberalise and simplify it seem to be well in progress.


This got me wondering where the rules came from in the first place -- asking who thought to draw them up, and why they were needed, and Wikipedia was able to enlighten me.

Gosh! I had never thought to ask that question before. How fascinating.


Wow! And this

 
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Kara Spengler

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Back in the 90s I had a store card (Lane Bryant, I forget if someone underwrote it) and that was before I had a name change. I had to have one card with my legal name but could then get another for a 'girlfriend' with any name I wanted. The latter got used, the former wound up in a drawer. I am guessing as long as the credit card company can tie an account to some individual out there they do not really care what the name is on the card itself.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Is there any legal procedure in the USA to have a change of gender officially recognised?

Over here there's been a procedure in place since 2004 to do that. I don't know a great deal about it, other than that it's currently undergoing a major revision to make the procedure far easier and more user-friendly, but at least it's there, and the document must be a great help with negotiating all the bureaucracy involved in changing your legal identity.



I feel a long post coming on about this Mastercard example being an example of how economic relations determine social and cultural reality, but I'll leave that for the time being.
 
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Kara Spengler

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Is there any legal procedure in the USA to have a change of gender officially recognised?

Over here there's been a procedure in place since 2004 to do that. I don't know a great deal about it, other than that it's currently undergoing a major revision to make the procedure far easier and more user-friendly, but at least it's there, and the document must be a great help with negotiating all the bureaucracy involved in changing your legal identity.



I feel a long post coming on about this Mastercard example being an example of how economic relations determine social and cultural reality, but I'll leave that for the time being.
Yes, but it (like the name change procedure) varies widely between jurisdictions. It may or may not require surgery and may or may not involve going before a judge. With the exception of the surgery part, the procedure for it and my name change were roughly the same when I was living in Virginia.
 

RealVioletWitch

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I don't know about the rest of Canada but changing your legal name in Ontario is super easy if you're over 18 and single. (If you're maried you gotta get the spouse's signature, and if 16 or 17 you gotta get a parent/guardian's signature.) You just gotta get someone to sign a page saying you've lived here for 12 months I think. They don't gotta see the rest of the form (i.e. what new name you want, why, etc), just the page they fill out / sign.

Then you get someone to notarize / witness you sign it. They don't need to see the whole form either, they just need to see the last page where you sign. Then you mail it all in with a cheque and your existing birth certificate, and in under 2 months you get a new birth cert and a change of name cert back in the mail.

No judges, no court, no lawyers. We got a clerk at city hall to do the witness/notarization, and a friend who's a university prof to do the 'lived here a year' page. The namechange fee and the notary fee was like, C$160 or so total.

With the new birth cert & name change cert, you can get a new drivers licence and health card, which was also super painless and its free here. We did all this in the 1990s and then again last year. The process didn't really change at all in 25 years haha.

I dunno how hard / easy it is to change the gender marker here nowadays, tho I heard there's an enby / X option now. In the 1990s you could change it but you had to have surgery and go through a bunch of paperwork and stuff.

Tho even with the legal namechange, lots of corporations still make it difficult. Like, all our bank stuff got changed but we had to spend like an hour there in person and they were not happy lol. Other government stuff was a lot harder too, even after the legal change. There's still some stuff we haven't got updated yet just cos it's just a PITA to deal with.

Anyways, we feel bad for people in places where it's not so easy to do the legal change. It should be a basic human right in our opinion. Like, everyone should get to choose their own name if they want. We're not stuck with anything else our parents forced on us, why we gotta be stuck with the name they picked?