I have a story to tell for Trans Day of Remembrance, and it's weird, because I'm remembering a person I never met, who influenced my life anyway. Hir name was Amelia. If you knew hir, I hope I'm honoring hir memory.
When I figured out I was trans, in Boston in 2018, I started meeting some of the local community of nerdy trans people. And in one crowd, I felt like I was meeting a ghost, Amelia, who had died from being refused mental health treatment just months earlier, and whose absence left a somber mood.
Starting from what I heard from people remembering hir, I needed to find out more about Amelia. I found that ze had written a number of papers published in math journals. This echoed a worry I was confronting at the time: I was still involved in natural language processing research, I had published papers, and my old name would haunt me whenever I or anyone else referred to those papers. And yet, here I saw a trans person with several papers under hir own name. Ze must have been able to change it and reclaim hir publishing history!
I couldn't ask hir how, but just knowing that it was possible was enough to get me started.
I contacted the people who run the ACL Anthology, which publishes papers from NLP conferences, and asked them, hey, apparently it's okay for trans people to change their name on papers, and I'm trans, so could I do that? I found a sympathetic ear among the grad students who run the website. They managed all the archives through Git anyway, so it wouldn't be hard to replace my name on a paper.
I repeated this for another paper on the ACL Anthology, and from there, I got in touch with a group called NCPWG that was developing the first official name change policy for a journal. With years of additional struggling against bureaucracies, it became possible for me and other trans authors to change our names in many publications.1
It was only a while into that very very lengthy process that I learned I'd been wrong about a key fact about Amelia. Amelia had come out and changed hir name several years before ze died. Ze had written almost all of hir papers after the name change, and just let the old ones fade into obscurity the way most papers do.
Amelia had never retroactively changed hir name on a published paper. I was apparently the first one to do that.2 Because I thought Amelia had done it.
Amelia's story is sad and ended too soon. And a not-actually-true thing I believed about hir life gave me the confidence to make a positive change. I don't know if there's any neat moral to that.
1 Name changes are possible in many parts of academia now, but not in Google Scholar, the zombie academic search engine that has an unearned position as the authority on all research. If you celebrate Trans Day of Rage instead, please forcefully remind a Googler that they run a trans-exclusionary site that destroys the research careers of trans people.
2 This feels like it cannot be true. How could I possibly be the first? If there's someone else who managed it before me, I'd like to know, and I'd be kind of relieved, because I feel like it's a lot to live up to.
