he/him

  • 3 Posts
  • 144 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle




  • There are limits in many places, sometimes in response to that time the artist Prince changed his name to a symbol, in some cases all special characters are banned too, so good luck to anyone with a non-English name. But outside of that? In most states you could probably name your kid Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, much worse names have happened.

    I think there’s been a couple of times where states have tried to stop individuals who have tried to name their kid Adolph Hitler or just some racist slogan, but I don’t remember how those went, it was a genuine legal question if those names could be blocked.

    Name changes, however, are a different thing - often requiring a judge to approve them, they can be rejected simply due to the misfortune of being a trans person in Texas, for example. Unless it’s a name change due to marriage, those are significantly easier for some reason.







  • This just unlocked one of my weirdest childhood memories. I played fastpitch softball as a kid, and at one away game the school’s softball field was next to a pasture. During warmups and the first several innings, we watched a guy dig a hole in the pasture. In the second inning or so, we hear a gunshot off in the distance, and the third has a truck dragging a horse corpse to the big hole. The man shoved the horse corpse into the grave, and takes three innings to bury the horse.

    At the team huddle after the game, one of my teammates said an eulogy for the horse.










  • Because there’s several comment chains about the use of pronouns and I wasn’t quite sure where to add this, I decided to do a top level comment. She wrote an autobiographical retrospective of her transition on her University of Michigan faculty page twenty years ago about a transition that started long before that (and her main faculty page is a fascinating time capsule of trans history). When I came out as trans in 2012 her page was already a bit dated and the start of my transition, as I experienced it, was firmly in the bad old days. Conway was part of a much older generation of trans people, and there were narratives we had to force ourselves into in order to access healthcare, especially the ideas that we always knew and the idea of being born in the wrong body, and (in her generation but not mine) the idea that you had to be heterosexual post-transition. For some, it fit well enough, but for others it was an act for the doctors just to get life saving healthcare.

    The obituary I posted reads like it was written twenty years ago and would have been incredibly respectful back then. It’s narratively in line with the framework of stories trans people had available to explain their lived experiences in the generation Lynn Conway was part of, and ones that Conway herself used extensively in her autobiographical work. I’m glad public understanding has grown and the narrative frameworks available have expanded. I feel like the obituary is in line with her own lived experiences as she understood them.