Quote from: JoanneB on June 21, 2016, 07:58:23 AM
About the only time your "Official" T status may come up is during any pre-employment background check. Typically you are handed a stack of papers which has the infamous "Names or aliases used...." question. A legal name change is a matter of public record. In this day and age difficult if not impossible to hide. Depending on your official gender status there may be an issue with health insurance spotting a mismatch.
Alternately, if it is unlikely they need to know your former name as a practical matter (e.g. you transitioned before adulthood or more than a decade or so ago, all of your recent work history and degrees are under your current name, and you have no criminal history from before your name change), you can ask HR beforehand if you even need to disclose the name under such circumstances. (They generally don't care about names that were changed before adulthood, and sometimes there is a "statute of limitations" that isn't expressly specified on the form.) What I said won't probably be of use though if you transitioned within the past few years as an adult, or they need to know as a practical matter to verify your credentials, in which case you would most likely need to disclose the name if you want to avoid problems with the background check.
Or, see if you can provide the name straight to the background check company (if done by a third party) rather than on the form that passes through the one making the hiring decision. (I recall a member on here who tried that and worked, but perhaps at the expense of slowing the check down if you want it done quickly. She put down something like "available to authorized investigator only" - the investigator contacted her about it and was handled discreetly.)
(From my research employers are not supposed to ask for a former name merely for the sake of knowing it, but if they need to know it for pragmatic purposes in order for a background or reference check to be successfully completed, then they can ask and you should disclose it - ideally from their perspective they should specify for what purposes they need to know on the form to avoid discrimination complaints. This precedent originally comes not from transgender people, but from immigrants who changed their names when moving to the U.S. whose name from the old country might lead to discrimination.)
Also, to JoanneB, some states no longer require transgender people to put a newspaper notice for their name changes.
