Students who don’t want to be known by their legal name on campus – because they are transgender, a victim of sexual abuse or just want to sound more American – can now play coy at Ohio University.
The Post reports that the new policy is the result of an effort started nearly three years ago by the Student Senate’s LGBT commissioners, who “worked closely” with officials “on the technicalities of the policy”:
The preferred name and pronoun policy, which was approved June 4, will allow all OU students to state their preferred names and select their preferred pronouns in their Student Portal, said Delfin Bautista, director of the LGBT Center. This name and pronoun will then show up on professors’ class rosters, advising lists and anywhere a student ID card is swiped. …
“Hopefully, what this will create is there may be faculty who may never know the legal name of a student,” Bautista said. “They may have Rachel in class, and Rachel has always been Rachel, but they may never know that Rachel’s legal name is Richard.”
Thus, students no longer need to worry about their legal names unintentionally “outing” them because their legal name does not match their identity.
The school wants to play down the LGBT roots of the change, which are evident in the “pronoun” component: The Post says “the policy can benefit international students who choose to go by an American version of their name,” and Bautista also says it will benefit students whose parents divorced.
The new policy won’t apply to diplomas, however, so “Rachel” will forever be known in school files as “Richard.”
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