ICS News Archive

New Policy Aims to Help Transgender Researchers Update Names on Old Work

Theresa Jean Tanenbaum, an associate professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, welcomed the news.

Her work had been published in several journals before she changed her name in 2019. Pushing each publisher to update their records accordingly has been a long and painful process, Dr. Tanenbaum said. Some of the objections she encountered stemmed from editors’ reluctance to “rewrite history,” or from concerns that name changes might open the door to fraud.

She founded the Name Change Policy Working Group in hopes of easing the name-changing process for others.

“Many trans people find their previous name harmful,” she said. “And the act of disclosing a trans person’s previous name is often used to attack us.”

Read the full story at The New York Times (subscription may be required)