Generally, a name defines an individual. It is a sense of who you are and how you present yourself in the world. However, when a person feels that his or her name no longer represents who he or she is as a person, one must undergo the arduous legal process of a name change in order to officially correct legal identity documents, including a driver’s license, passport, marriage certificate and deeds to real property.
Under Pennsylvania law, individuals seeking a legal name change for reasons other than marriage (which now includes LGBT individuals!), divorce or adoption must file a petition with the Court of Common Pleas for the county in which they reside. Accordingly, you must provide fingerprints to process through the FBI database, submit to a criminal-background check to ensure the name change is not to avoid civil or criminal judgments and a family court-judgment search to ensure you are not attempting to avoid paying child support. As if those requirements were not enough, you must also publish notice of the name-change hearing in two local newspapers of general circulation and, depending on the county, have a hearing presided over by a judge who asks questions regarding the intent of the name change.
These requirements come with significant obstacles for people within the LGBT community, especially transgender individuals. In addition to the emotional toll and length of the process itself (which is sometimes enough to dissuade LGBT individuals from completing the process), people are subject to an excessive cost burden. Each name-change costs approximately $900 in filing fees, judgment searches and publication costs. Moreover, if the individual has lived in any other county over the past five years, he or she needs to contact the county clerk in that county to obtain judgment searches, done at a cost of approximately $75 each. These costs are assuming that the individual is a pro se petitioner proceeding without an attorney. Having an attorney assist in this process can tack on an additional $500-$750 in fees but, on the flipside, can save the individual countless hours of frustration.
In sum, with the assistance of an attorney, an LGBT individual could pay up to $1,500 in costs for a name change.
In addition to the cumbersome financial, emotional and time requirements, there are also significant and paralyzing stigmatic effects that result from the process. The need to publish the name-change petition in two local newspapers poses a problem for most transgender individuals, who are fearful of discrimination and ultimately violence. I always request a waiver of publication for my transgender clients, as the cost is unnecessary and the dangers that come with publishing the name change are not worth it.
Those people, like myself, advocating for a major facelift of Pennsylvania’s name-change law suggest that the law should reflect neighboring states’ laws, which have been revised and streamlined. Modifications include:
• Removing the ban on people convicted of certain felonies, or those who are on parole/probation. New Jersey is progressive in that it only requires that, if under indictment or convicted, the petitioner make best efforts to notify the prosecuting attorney.
• Moving the process to Probate Court — as is done in Ohio, Connecticut and Alabama — to make the process faster and less expensive, due to the docket congestion in the Court of Common Pleas.
• Removing the publication requirement, as many states do not require this and it greatly enhances the cost.
• Removing the fingerprints and judgment-search requirements and replacing them with a bundled civil-criminal background check, as is done in other states. This would both reduce the time burden on the petitioner, as well as the cost.
The Pennsylvania name-change law is ripe for an overhaul to bring it up to speed with our present-day technologies and, in turn, do a lot for the LGBT community, which suffers the most prejudice in having to avail themselves to this process to legitimize their true sense of self.