If you want to help trans people, and you work in tech: think about how your product handles names and genders. Can users change them? Is it a self-service? Do traces of the old name remain?
Then, fix it. Push back against resistance. Advocate for us.
It won't fix bigotry, or healthcare access, or w/e. But updating our details is a process full of hurdles that we have to go through at a really vulnerable point in our lives, and you can make a small improvement for a large number of us.
@daisy I legally changed my name in January and got a new personal email address at the same time (the old one used my deadname). I am now stuck in an administrative maze of twisty passages, all alike, as I try to update every organisation I ever interact with.
Favourite so far is the shopping site where the script to update your details just permanently hangs...
(Plus my surname has an apostrophe in it and despite it being 2023, so many sites still can't handle it.)
@DensityPoint @daisy Crazy, in this day and age. People change their names for all sorts of reasons, it shouldn't ever be difficult. And of course names contain all sorts of symbols, accented letters etc. We don't live in a 7-bit ASCII world! My own last name is Scottish so uses camel case: McA... and I'm always amazed at how many sites can't handle the capitalized A.
Also, without being personal, or prying, good on you!
@amca01 @daisy I've sort of more-or-less got used to losing the apostrophe but Oneil rather than ONeil really irritates me.
Wrt my name change: I spent about 18 months using my original initials "TC" as my name whilst I tried to work out what I wanted to be called. Because I'm an academic, I wanted to maintain a connection to my old publications, so I wanted to keep the same initials. It was challenging finding both a first and middle name with the right initial letters that worked together! (And the fact that "Tacey" and "TC" are near homophones is also good.)
Daisy Leigh
Tacey "not very smart" O'Neil
Al