Changing Your Name After Marriage When You’re Gay - Bucks Blog - NYTimes.com

Changing Your Name After Marriage When You’re Gay - Bucks Blog - NYTimes.com

By JENNIFER SARANOW SCHULTZ
Changing legal documents like Social Security cards and passports can be difficult for gay couples who get married.

While changing a name after marriage can often be a struggle for heterosexual women and men, it’s a lot harder if you’re gay.

Couples who live in states that don’t allow or recognize same-sex marriage or its equivalents (civil unions, for instance) generally can’t just rely on a marriage certificate as proof of a name change and instead have to go through the in-court name change process. This means they will have to pay a $100 to $400 fee to file a petition at court, publish a notice in a local newspaper and get a court order officially changing their name and that they can use to change everything else (just one more area where being gay can cost you more).

Even more, couples who live in states that do allow or recognize same-sex marriage and civil unions often in practice don’t have it that much easier. While changing a name on a driver’s license can be done without a problem in such states, changing federal documentation can be trickier.

Since the federal government doesn’t recognize the right to same-sex marriage, even if you get married in a state that allows it, whether you can get the name change processed by Social Security or the passport office merely with the marriage certificate and required forms currently tends “to be hit and miss,” said Emily Doskow, an attorney in California who specializes in same-sex and transgender family issues and writes about marriage and divorce issues for the legal information publisher Nolo. “It depends on what local office you are going to, what the opinion is at the moment and whether you get a staff person who cares or doesn’t care,” she said.

This is despite the fact that a spokeswoman for the Social Security office said such same-sex couples should have no problems changing their Social Security cards because the marriage certificate is a legal name change document in those states and the office follows state rules in regard to name changes. In addition, while the Passport Agency used to not recognize the marriage certificates of same-sex couples as name change documents, the State Department earlier this year changed its policy to permit the document to be used as proof for a same-sex last name change if it’s a legal way to change one’s last name under a state’s law.

Problems now are because of “misunderstanding and misinformation at the passport and Social Security offices,” said Karen Loewy, senior staff attorney at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, a legal rights organization focusing on New England. “The marriage license should be enough for any name change” in a state that allows or recognizes same-sex marriage or its equivalents, she said.

She said she expected the hurdles to eventually go away. But for now, she recommends that couples who face problems trying to change their Social Security cards or passports keep trying, go in person to talk with someone else in the office and bring or send in additional supporting changed identification like driver’s licenses and this document from the Glad Web site about the changed law. “There is no reason folks should have to go to court,” Ms. Loewy said.