The story of my name change
In March 2015, after years of wanting to make the change, I finally decided to pull the trigger and change my last name, combining my bachelor name (Cole) with my wife’s last name (Ho) for a portmanteau: Coho. (I also considered Hole, Coelho, Cholo, and Coleho, and Ocho, but some of those would have been a disaster.)
“I don’t know the answer to your question. Ask Hole!” The jokes just would have written themselves with that one.
Why’d I change my name? Those who know me well know that I’m critical of the patriarchal assumption that women should be the ones to change their names in event of marriage. I understand the desire to merge one’s identity into a new family unit. I understand that lots of people don’t have a problem with the practice. But for me, this and other marriage practices just feel so unequal that they’ve always irritated me.
More practically, and less idealistically, the birth of my first child presented us with a question. What would the kid’s last name be? Neither parent wanted our children to carry just one name, so we set about searching for non-hyphenated surnames for the kids. My son was the first to receive the Coho surname, then my daughter received it when she was born, and finally, I was the third to receive it when I legally changed my name about six months after she was born.
At work, I feel an obligation to help dismantle the discriminatory norm that assumes the burden and professionally problematic process of changing one’s name should be entirely shouldered by women. In an era where searching for a person’s name leads to their their LinkedIn, Twitter, and Wikipedia pages, a name change comes with the very real cost of hurting the ability for a person’s network to easily find them and connect with them. Just as renaming a product results in the loss of organic search traffic to a product’s landing page, renaming a person reduces the ability for people to find the renamed person they’re looking for. I think it’s unfair that our culture requires that this cost fall to one gender only.
In addition to the hit to my organic search results, the name change may also signal something about my work-life priorities to the (hopefully increasingly rare) group of biased hiring managers who prefer to men with SAHM-style spouses who enable those men to work long hours with little obligation to share childcare or housekeeping duties.
There’s also the cost in time and money to deal with the name change paperwork. I procrastinate on taxes, expense reports, and other bureaucratic tasks, and my name change forced me to contend with forms, paperwork, fees, and four visits to the county courthouse.
All of this inconvenience and frustration pales in comparison to the value it brings me and the family. It was especially important for me to teach my son and daughter that name changes are a choice, and that they should be willing to question culture norms, especially the cultural constructs of gender. They’re now six and four and we haven’t talked about it yet, but I’m hopeful that they’ll eventually find love and partnership and that they’ll bring this lesson on equality forward into those relationships.
Bonus trivia: It wasn’t until 2007 that the State of California was sued by a couple (with the help of the ACLU) on this issue. The state subsequently offered men the option to change their names when getting wed. Doesn’t help me, but I’m glad to see progress happening.
