Technically, My Legal Name is Jeremy Jeremy Maxwell Green: A Personal Micro-Odyssey
This post will cover some a series of events that might have, for another person, been terribly burdensome. For my own part, I work in an unbelievably supportive office, have a wonderful support network, and have long since stopped seeing my life as anything other than an exercise in absurdity. Thus, what might have been a horribly stressful and dehumanizing experience was one I was very well able to laugh through. I recount this story as one that I think is quite funny, but with full recognition that if only a few facts were different, it would not be funny at all. Additionally, I want to note that I don’t know that there’s a thesis or point to this article other than sharing a narrative of some things that happened to me.
I decided to come out at work on Wednesday, November 9, 2016. I decided I’d change the name I used at work sometime in early 2017. I sent a letter explaining things to most of my law firm in March. Since it also does a pretty good job of giving you context on how I experience gender, I’ve included it here (bracketed numbers refer to footnotes reproduced below the signature):
My dear Fried Frank family:
This letter is, perhaps, slightly overdue.[1] I am transgender.
Over the past half-year, I have seen that Fried Frank is the sort of place where I will be respected for the quality of my work, not my adherence to a rigidly defined binary gender role. I’ve spent much time internally debating the decision to “come out” at work, but the support, inclusion, and authentic love I have experienced in my short time at the firm makes me certain that this is the right choice.
Specifically, I am a non-binary transgender person.[2] For me, this means I present and identify differently with different people and in different contexts.[3] I personally do not experience a particularly large degree of dysphoria[4] when I am perceived and treated as, for example, a cisgender[5] male. This remains true so long as I am able, at other times, to express otherwise.
What does this mean for your interactions with me? If this is new and difficult, the easiest answer is this: not a whole lot. I am comfortable with any set of pronouns, so please use whichever set fits how you see me. People in my life use at least four different pronoun sets[6] to talk about me. Therefore, if using “he/him/his” is a comfortable default, and that is easiest for you, please feel free to continue.
However, this may mean I present myself in ways that strike you as too feminine to be “he/his/him” or too masculine to be “she/her/hers.” In these moments, I ask you to recall this letter, and remember that I do not actually belong in the mental boxes for gender you may be used to using. Additionally, feel free to use a gender neutral alternative, such as “they” or “their.”[7]
To mark this professional transition, I will begin using a shortened form of my name in professional correspondence. “Jeremy” will be shortened to simply “Remy” (but the “J” will stick around because I’m rather fond of it and there’s family significance). So, “J. Remy Green” will be the name on my door and on my emails (but the occasional “Jeremy” instead of “Remy,” much like an occasional “Michael” instead of “Mike,” will not offend me[8]).
Finally, I want to open my metaphorical and literal door to you. I am happy to discuss any questions you may have, whether they are about how to interact with my gender or about the gender of your family, friends, and loved ones. I am also happy to be a resource for you, should you want one on these issues, especially when you all have welcomed me so fully.
Yours very truly,
J. Remy Green
_____________________________________________
1 After much thought, I’ve decided to structure this message in the best way I know how; as a letter with footnotes, citations (with explanatory parentheticals), and as thorough and clear a treatment of its subject as I can provide.
2 See, e.g., Genderqueer, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ (Mar. 3, 2017) (defining genderqueer as “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity cannot be categorized as solely male or female”).
3 Non-binary identification can mean other things. I do not wish to give the impression that what I say here is true for every non-binary transgender person.
4 “Gender Dysphoria” is the significant distress caused by “the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender.” See Gender Dysphoria, Am. Psychiatric Ass’n, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 451 (5th ed. 2013)
5 See Cisgender, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/ (Mar. 3 2017) (defining cisgender as “of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth”).
6 For more information, see Avinash Chak, Beyond ‘he’ and ‘she:’ The rise of non-binary pronouns, BBC (Dec. 7, 2015), http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34901704.
7 For those among you who may have some grammarian objection to the use of “they” as singular, I would point out that “you” was, at one time, exclusively a plural pronoun as well. Id. (“English has a precedent for a plural pronoun coming to be used in the singular — the pronoun ‘you.’ Until the 17th Century a single person was addressed with ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’ Later ‘you’ became perfectly acceptable in both plural and singular.”).
8 Once more, I want to make clear that this guidance is particular to me. Other transgender individuals may have very different relationships with the names they were given at birth. See, e.g., Transphobia, Wikipedia (Mar. 3, 2017), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia/ (noting that “[d]eliberately misgendering a transgender person is considered extremely offensive by transgender individuals” and that misgendering “ordinarily takes the form of a person using pronouns (including ‘it’) to describe someone that are not the ones that person prefers, calling a person ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir’ in contradiction to the person’s gender identity, using a pre-transition name for someone instead of a post-transition one (called ‘deadnaming’)”).
The reaction I received at work to this letter was uniformly and overwhelmingly positive. In addition to just being supportive, I received glowing praise for the writing, endless offers to help in any and all capacities, and any number of other wonderful things. In short, things looked great.
A short time later, I received a call from my office’s managing attorney. For context: a managing attorney does a whole lot at a law firm; they are basically responsible for making the whole operation function, legally speaking. They are a source for answers to an endless array of technical “how do I do XYZ?”-type questions. Additionally, John, the managing attorney at our office is a wonderful, funny, brilliant, talented, and warm person. He is both a colleague and a friend — and one I respect and value greatly. So, to be clear, John is in no way a villain in this story.
I found out I passed the bar in November, but admission to the bar in New York — particularly in Brooklyn where I live — can be slow. So in March, I still had my application for admission pending, in which I’d sworn on penalty of perjury that the only name I went by was “Jeremy Maxwell Green.” John pointed out that, if I started using another name, technically that application might be considered perjurous.
Moreover, he continued, he didn’t think that most folks would accept shortening “Jeremy” to “J. Remy” as a conventional nickname (posing problems that are not posed by, say, practicing law under the name “Dick” when your name is “Richard”). Therefore, even after I was in the clear on the perjury issue, using that name on legal signatures would probably require changing my legal name. Finally, if I were to begin changing my name then and there, it would very likely delay my admission to the Bar for an unknown period of time. Given that it was already about 9 months after I’d taken the Bar, and any number of professionally useful things were on hold until I was admitted (printing business cards, signing my own name to legal documents, or being identified as a lawyer on my firm’s website, for example), that delay was really not something I wanted to contend with.
I was sworn in to the New York Bar in June, and submitted my application to change my name shortly after. In the time between March and June, I thought a lot about what I would change my name to.
“j. remy green” is the name I wanted to use for a number of reasons, both significant and insignificant. Among them: I really like the letter “j” and have been signing emails with it for my whole digital life, “j.remy.green@gmail” was available, there is familial significance to the initials (J, M, G) in my name, I don’t actually dislike “Jeremy” (see note 8 in the letter above) as a name, “j. remy” uses a back-half nickname (like Beth for Elizabeth or Xander for Alexander) and I rather like those, there is a rich history of first initials being used to mask the gender of writers, I don’t have much interest in becoming completely detached from things previously associated with my name and dramatic changes of name can cause a lot more headache than I want. . . The list is, in short (ha), long.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make my name reduce to “j. remy green” while simultaneously not changing much and also satisfying the “conventional nickname” requirement. And I came to an answer that is probably rather predictable if you know me: if I can’t do the simple thing that’s what I think rational people ought to do, I’m going to do the most absurd and obnoxious option available that still gets me the thing I want.
Conventional rules of names apparently allow shortening a name to an initial (I would still argue this is ridiculous and arbitrary, but… a different battle a different day). They also allow shortening a name by crossing out letters at the beginning or the end. So, “Jeremy” can shorten to “J.” or “Remy” permissibly, but not both. And then I arrived at the answer: “Jeremy Jeremy.”
As far as I was able to play this out, there was no reason I should be unable to shorten two identical names in different ways. So I put together a petition and went in to court to change my name to “Jeremy Jeremy Maxwell Green.” Worth noting: I also used a singular “their” into the case caption.
I had a (perhaps un-)surprisingly contentious conversation with the court lawyer working for the judge the day I went in to change the name. He didn’t believe I was serious about changing my name to “Jeremy Jeremy.” Over the course of our conversation, he assumed I wasn’t a lawyer for some reason and was talking down to me (odd, because I explicitly mentioned “my law firm,” “my managing attorney,” and “changing the name I have registered with the bar” in our discussion in the small conference room in chambers), but I had a rare moment where I said exactly what I wanted to say when I wanted to say it. As he was explaining, “oh, you said [something] which made me think…” I interrupted him and said calmly “No, I mentioned my law firm and have not said anything suggesting I wasn’t a lawyer. You simply made an unwarranted assumption for reasons that are all your own.”
At this point, he paused, considered, and very much to his credit, said “I suppose I don’t really need to understand the reasons you’re doing this, but this is the name you want to change to and you’re sure about that?” I smiled and said yes, gathered my papers, and we left the chambers conference room.
From here, the name change should have been a relatively simple matter of publishing the change, notifying a few government agencies, then doing another pile of paperwork to change my bar admissions and registrations. Most of that is currently underway, and I am still sorting out a bit of it. However, another (one last? one more?) little incident happened in notification stage of the change. One of the parties that the New York court asked me to notify of the name change was the United States Department of State. There were a handful of other government entities I notified, none of which had any problems. But I got this lovely letter from the Department of State:
Now, this letter in particular represents something that might have frightened or stressed someone who isn’t me out. It looks very official, it sounds kind of threatening, and it doesn’t make clear at all what someone ought to do to give the Department of State the notice required by the state court’s name change order:
After confirming with a colleague or two that the best reading of this response was that it was (1) silly, (2) irrelevant, and (3) clearly meant that the person at State didn’t actually read the copy of the Order they were sent, I penned a quick, slightly snide response and sent the Order back.
And that’s about it. My legal name is technically “Jeremy Jeremy Maxwell Green.” Shortly, the name I have registered with the New York Bar will be a shortened form of that: “J. Remy Green.” My business cards (1) exist now and (2) say “J. Remy Green.” And I’m rather happy with how this panned out. I even got to write a nasty-ish letter.
But I keep coming back to this problem: “I give very few fucks. What if I gave more fucks than I do?” I bounce back very easily from silliness like the court lawyer being rude and talking down to me. I laugh at administrative cock-ups like the letter from the State Department. But that’s me. And I know there are even moments in my life when stupid shit like this might have been more than I could handle. So that’s this story. I hope sharing it was worth something.
With love,
j.
