Changing last names

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by DapperButch

Why is that? Why wouldn't you fall in love with a person who would want that? Who is that "kind of person"?

Names are powerful symbols. I wouldn't expect a person who I partnered with or married to change her name to mine because her name is her own identity, and I wouldn't want her to change something as primary as her identity in order to marry me. That would be an absorption of her autonomous personhood into mine that would not feel comfortable for me.

For exactly the same reasons, I wouldn't want to be with a person who expected me to subsume my identity into hers. Should a prospective partner ever ask that of me the extra irritant in her request, which would be coming from a masculine person, would come about because that very symbolic gesture would carry the freight of thousands of years of autonomous males legally dominating disenfranchised females. Even if the earth shifted on its axis and I were to consider marriage to a person who was not masculine, marriage has meant ownership of one person by another for so long that I'm particularly prickly about anything that would appear to diminish my autonomy in a legally sanctioned relationship.

I understand that butches are not men. Butches and femmes get to choose the rituals that work for them, those choices may or may not reflect heteronormative values, and it's not my business to judge if they do. I just won't be going anywhere near that road, much less traipse down it myself. Those are my personal choices, and I feel pretty strongly about them.

That said, trans men usually get pretty bent out of shape when people say they're not really men. So when men of any kind expect women, femmes or otherwise, to reflexively change their names when they marry, you can bet your next mortgage payment that I'm going to get cranky. Men and women choose to do this all the time. Their lives, their choices. The part that really freaks me out is that no one is questioning why women reflexively change their names and men never consider doing so. Oh, perhaps they might hyphenate, but when Joe Smith marries Jane Johnson, they never become the Johnsons. Has anyone asked why that is since… ohhh… 1979?

What kind of person would expect me to change my name to their's when I marry? That would be a person who has never met me.