Principle #3
Name changes should not draw attention to the gender identity of an author, nor create a clear juxtaposition between the current name and the previous name.
Transgender people face significant discrimination, bias, and precarity as a consequence of their gender identity. Published works associated with a trans person’s previous name represent a direct threat to the safety and wellbeing of trans people, potentially exposing them to harm, including online harassment, employment discrimination, in-person assault, and even state sanctioned incarceration and violence in some regions. In the best of circumstances, such disclosures rob the transgender person of their right to privacy and the right to decide the time and place to “come out” to strangers in their professional life. Any publisher who implements a process for trans authors to change their name should work to minimize the disclosure risk to the requesting scholar. This includes foregoing traditional announcements and notices typically associated with updates, corrections, retractions, and errata, both in metadata structures and on changed documents.
We recognize the tension between the need to protect the privacy of authors who have changed their name and the desire to prevent recurrence and dissemination of their previous (obsolete) name. Without an announcement or notice of correction, the chances of third parties updating the name in their records drops substantially. This is a place where new infrastructures are needed, as current publishing and dissemination systems are not designed to push discrete updates of names to third parties.