A Few Places where my Dead Name (Still) Lives Rent Free
BIAS COLLINS
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BIAS COLLINS (he/him/his) is a graduate student in the PhD in Literature program at the University of California, San Diego. His creative and academic work is currently predominantly motivated by his experiences navigating graduate school as a mad, queer, transgender person.
/// To me, being kaleidoscoped is a process where fracturing creates new w/holes in formations of Truth. /// In a society inundated with tracking and identification technology, my attempts to distance myself from my birth name have been thwarted by endless automated systems and decentralized databases that spread my deadname amongst themselves. To set the record straight, they often require me to navigate tedious, dysphoria-inducing processes to prove who I once was in order to validate who I now am. Sometimes - often - these efforts are futile. Additionally, I frequently do not have updating privileges to non-digitized data access points - such as those logged in the private cerebral spaces of my friends and family. This piece names just some of the places the presence of the ghost of who I once was still lingers, not truly a dead name at all. |