If you know where to look, it's all over tech - like surname fields that insist surnames are Always within certain lengths (usually 3 to 30 characters), which tells my friend with a Romanized Chinese surname that her name isn't "real", and equally excluded many traditional Spanish surnames of the construction NameA y NameB. (Not to mention database construction that doesn't allow "special characters" like ñ or é, which can meaningfully change a name or word!)
It's even down to the way IDs are stored in, say, Microsoft Active Directory - you know, the security structure that underpins *most* tech in the world - instead of an immutable number and a matched, mutable text string, it's an immutable text string, and you can't change it without collossally fucking everything up, which absolutely sucks for anyone who has to change their name because most places use your name as your login. So for example, let's take a person named Anne Williams, whose login is awilliams under MS. What *should* be done is Anne gets assigned a unique ID number (let's say, 44350) but humans are bad at remembering those, so we tell the system "and the login awilliams means 44350." Computers are smart enough to handle this. Then if Anne marries/divorces and her surname becomes Reese, you change the string to areese and the system knows that's still 44350, no problem.
What actually happens - again, in the thing used by most of the world - is you set up Anne as awilliams and then when she changes her name, you have the choice of breaking and recreating literally all of her security and logins and losing all her history, or making her continue to use the incorrect surname, because "the system doesn't handle it well." because nobody thought it would need to.
It's "little" stuff, but it's also a big honking red flag that you don't belong here blaring on repeat, every single time.
(I did not change my name when I got married because I took one look at the paperwork and decided "Fuck it." Of the people I went to college with, only three have changed their names upon marriage; some had professional credentials established under their birth names that would have been difficult to convert, but most of us just went "well that's fucking annoying." And yet, even this choice had problems, like me spending five whole minutes - in the year of our lord 2017 - arguing with the bureaucrat at the passport office that yes, in fact, I have a different surname from my husband and no, I don't use his, yes, I'm certain, I only use my birth name.)
So many assumptions reminding me I'm not a real person in my own right--and I have it easy, because I have an (unusually spelled) coded-White name that people won't look at and go "lol that's not a real name."
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Date: 2022-04-09 05:06 pm (UTC)It's even down to the way IDs are stored in, say, Microsoft Active Directory - you know, the security structure that underpins *most* tech in the world - instead of an immutable number and a matched, mutable text string, it's an immutable text string, and you can't change it without collossally fucking everything up, which absolutely sucks for anyone who has to change their name because most places use your name as your login. So for example, let's take a person named Anne Williams, whose login is awilliams under MS. What *should* be done is Anne gets assigned a unique ID number (let's say, 44350) but humans are bad at remembering those, so we tell the system "and the login awilliams means 44350." Computers are smart enough to handle this. Then if Anne marries/divorces and her surname becomes Reese, you change the string to areese and the system knows that's still 44350, no problem.
What actually happens - again, in the thing used by most of the world - is you set up Anne as awilliams and then when she changes her name, you have the choice of breaking and recreating literally all of her security and logins and losing all her history, or making her continue to use the incorrect surname, because "the system doesn't handle it well." because nobody thought it would need to.
It's "little" stuff, but it's also a big honking red flag that you don't belong here blaring on repeat, every single time.
(I did not change my name when I got married because I took one look at the paperwork and decided "Fuck it." Of the people I went to college with, only three have changed their names upon marriage; some had professional credentials established under their birth names that would have been difficult to convert, but most of us just went "well that's fucking annoying." And yet, even this choice had problems, like me spending five whole minutes - in the year of our lord 2017 - arguing with the bureaucrat at the passport office that yes, in fact, I have a different surname from my husband and no, I don't use his, yes, I'm certain, I only use my birth name.)
So many assumptions reminding me I'm not a real person in my own right--and I have it easy, because I have an (unusually spelled) coded-White name that people won't look at and go "lol that's not a real name."