The other day I couldn’t buy an article from an academic publisher because my surname has a hyphen.
Today I can’t get into Dropbox because it has decided my email address—which I have had an account under for nearly a decade—is invalid.
I swear we have gotten worse at this stuff lately…? #UIFails
Fun extra context: when we married, my husband came with two last names (Buttfield-Addison) from his two parents. I gave up mine because I wasn’t attached to it, had already changed it before when my parent married, and adding a second hyphenation would have been chaos. Mostly because of the two of us, he had written more books and therefore had more Google-ability to lose.
Everyone always asks me “two surnames… which one is yours?” and I have to bottle the internal rant I have about how the idea of double-barrelled surnames is nice and was an important step in the broader context of evolving the meaning of marriage / changing the perception of female “ownership” in hetero marriage / removing the male-female “roles” in other gendered marriages… but they don’t scale. The minute you have kids and they marry, they lose one or both. Many other cultures who have used double names have known this for a long time!
@oclsc I’m not resentful about the name I have, because I was not sentimental about mine. But many are, and expectations work against them. Society expects couples to marry, society expects them to end up with the same name, and even though society is becoming more okay with a solution that allows both parties to retain equal amounts of their original identity, the solution we have landed on doesn’t scale and will result in the original problem again a generation later.
All of these things are silly. I don’t think I’ll live to see marriage cease to be the “default” that is enforced by so many economic and social systems, but I do hope I see more creative mixing of identities when individuals become a union. And for systems—everything from search engines to academic journals, user accounts to fellowships—to become much better at identifying individuals by something other than names which may change over time. Which would benefit even more people than just married ones!
So yes, even though I personally find it funny, it’s still important to change.
Mars Buttfield-Addison đź›°
Norman Wilson