Deadnaming and Reclaiming

For trans people, names can be a source of joy… and pain

Twice a year, when Daylight Savings Time begins and ends, I putter around changing all the clocks in the house that don’t update themselves automatically. One of these is the caller ID display on my landline phone. It does update to the current time once someone calls, but I’m impatient for that to happen, as we get few calls to our landline other than spammers and scammers. So I call my home number from my cell phone to hasten the process.

This year, I noticed something strange and alarming: My deadname — the name I was given at birth and went by before my gender transition — came up on the caller ID display. As I’d gotten a legal change of name and gender five years ago, I was sure I had updated it with my cell phone carrier long before, and would have noticed my (increasingly bothersome) deadname come up during previous Daylight Savings change rituals.

Fortunately, my cell phone service provider offers excellent customer service. I opened up a web chat and explained the situation. It was a Sunday evening, but they responded very quickly, and were friendly and helpful as always. Excerpts from a redacted transcript of our chat follow:

(09:09:05 PM) Pax Ahimsa Gethen: The caller ID on my cell phone is displaying my previous name, which I changed legally several years ago. Please reset to show my current name or just remove the ID completely.
(09:09:16 PM) *** Denise W joined the chat ***
(09:09:22…