Culture

Between the Binary: My Gmail Won't Stop Deadnaming Me


 

I’m a millennial and I’m bad at tech. I have no instinct for computer-y stuff, no patience for it either. My devices yell at me, alert alert; I ignore alerts because I don’t understand them. They compound. Eventually I melt down. In the past I’d go to a Genius Bar, try not to cry, try not to seem too ditzy. These days, I bring my computer to my husband, whose first job was literally in tech support (how sexy is that?). He’ll perform some wizardry, hand the machine back to me, it no longer sputtering with little complaining windows about how my this or that is full.

My being-bad-at-tech has felt especially acute over the last few years, as I’ve faced a situation that seems small but isn’t, and one I am relieved to finally complain about publicly. Here it is: Gmail is fucking up my life.

A few years ago, as my ability to lie about my gender began to wane, I finally reconciled myself to the idea that I am nonbinary, I am trans. Over time, that realization — I am trans — shifted inside me, from something horrifying to something wonderful. Then a to-do list stretched before me, all the medical and bureaucratic minutiae that come with a realization like this.

For example, there was the matter of my name. For a long time, really my entire life, I’d preferred the gender neutral nickname that many called me already, Sandy. Before I undertook the process of changing my name legally, I went to change my email address. The mere idea of a new one, of emailing as myself, thrilled me.

Right away I ran into a wall: Gmail does not permit one to simply change one’s email address. You can of course change your display name. But, like many people, a decade before I’d chosen an email that was also my first and last name. I searched around. The more I read the more it seemed that changing your Gmail address itself is impossible. For people like me, Gmail had only one suggestion: Start a new account.

Bummed, I started a new account. I debated trying to export and carry over all my old data, but it felt like hauling along a carful of trash to a new condo. For a while I enjoyed the newness of this blank and ignorant inbox. But I soon discovered how annoying it was to have none of my old contacts, none of the zillion archived emails that served as an annex to my actual memory. I started keeping two inboxes open simultaneously — my old one, which I’d try to avoid clicking on, and then my new one. But this, I found, was no solution. Gmail would constantly assume my old account was my primary one, no matter how much I tried to convince it otherwise. I’d calendar something and not realize I’d done so on my old calendar. I missed appointments, and once an important phone call. All the while, I felt the irony of the fact that here I was, trying to give myself the gift of no longer having to be faced with my former name, and I still had my old inbox open all the time. I closed the tab. However many minutes or hours later, inevitably, in search of some detail, I’d re-open it.

Changing my name legally was complicated and not without cost, but at least such change was possible, unlike with Google. I drove to the courthouse at the county seat. I sat with a clerk in a little office, surrounded by photos of her daughters and their drawings. She, like the woman at the post office when I later went to change my passport, assumed I was changing my name because I was marrying. “I’m changing my first and middle names,” I’d explain, and then I wouldn’t say more, still fearful to tell strangers the next part, I am trans. After, these interactions became chillier. As we passed paperwork back and forth, I became especially aware of my new middle name, Ernest. (A nod to one of my heroes, Oscar Wilde; also a joke to myself about not lying anymore.)



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