{"id":60,"date":"2007-03-28T11:10:13","date_gmt":"2007-03-28T16:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=60"},"modified":"2007-03-28T13:07:59","modified_gmt":"2007-03-28T18:07:59","slug":"institutionalized-sexism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=60","title":{"rendered":"Institutionalized Sexism"},"content":{"rendered":"

We hear all about ‘glass ceilings’ and other forms of institutionalized sexism towards women. Today I’m going to tell you story about sexism towards men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When we got married in 1998, my wife and I agreed to both take each others’ last names through the common practice of hyphenation. “Frances Collins” and “Ben Sussman” would become “Frances Collins-Sussman” and “Ben Collins-Sussman”. No big deal, right?<\/p>\n

Well, it was no big deal for my wife. She walked into the Department of Motor Vehicles, showed them her marriage license, and asked for a new driver’s license. “No problem,” they said, “what would you like for a new last name?”. They quickly issued her a new I.D., which she then carried over to the Social Security Administration to get a new card, and to various other agencies. Each agency was happy to reissue documents for her.<\/p>\n

I tried to do the same thing. Despite my showing the marriage license, not a single<\/em> government institution was willing to change my records and issue me new documents. Each one looked at me like my request was insane, and they all gave the same reply: “Sorry, we won’t give you a new I.D. unless you show us that some other agency has already done it.” No agency was willing to be the first one to do it.<\/p>\n

I finally got the Social Security office to give me more details. They said that they’d only issue me a new card if I legally changed my name. In other words, I had to fill out a bunch of forms, swear I wasn’t changing my name to evade debt, place a public notice in a newspaper for a few weeks, then go swear in front of a live judge that I want to change my name… oh, and pay $200 for the court proceedings too. And pay another $220 for the other official name-changing processing. Here’s a receipt<\/a> that shows the line-items. Then, after all that, I had to change my birth certificate as well. Yes, seriously. Apparently a birth certificate is not<\/strong> an immutable record of history, but it’s some sort of morphable record of identity.<\/p>\n

In summary: my wife was instantly allowed to change her name with no forms or fuss. I, however, had to pay over $400 and stand before a judge. My marriage was irrelevant — I went through the exact same process that I would have gone through if I had wanted to change my name to “Glorbo P. Stranborf.”<\/p>\n

I’m surprised there hasn’t been some sort of class-action suit against the government about this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We hear all about ‘glass ceilings’ and other forms of institutionalized sexism towards women. Today I’m going to tell you story about sexism towards men. When we got married in 1998, my wife and I agreed to both take each others’ last names through the common practice of hyphenation. “Frances Collins” and “Ben Sussman” would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}