I’m currently filling out the gateway candidate profile, and have a couple questions. I’m hoping to, in case of acceptances, live in All-Gender dorms and enter the school as my preferred name and gender.
I’ve put my legal name as “First Name” and my name as “Preferred Name”. Is this correct? I’m wondering because I don’t particularly want my legal first name to be the name under which my application is submitted, for obvious reasons, however, it is still the name on my report cards.
Should I list my gender as “Male” or “Self-Identify (Transgender Male)”?
And lastly, for the recommendation letters, would you think that it’s better that teachers refer to me as “Legal Name” and subsequently use she/her pronouns or as my preferred name and he/him? Of course, at the bottom of the form it says my legal name, so this might be confusing (for example, if legal name was “Jane Doe” but the letter said “John Doe is a wonderful…”).
I hope this makes sense, I’d be glad to provide clarification as I realise it’s rather unusual circumstances.
Legal name is the one that appears on official documents, like birth certificate, unless you have legally changed it. This is important to the school because it links to things like SSN.
Preferred name is the one you go by. Teachers will probably use your preferred name when they refer to you in recs as that is presumably how they know you.
At the school I am most familiar with (George in PA), nobody at the school would use any name other than your preferred name.
Thanks! I’m aware of the difference between legal and preferred. My current teachers call me by my initials (not sure how this happened but is preferable to them using my legal name). The question then is do I ask them to refer to me as my preferred name or legal?
For the recs, it truly truly does not matter. Schools have been dealing with this for decades (not necessarily trans, but with Asian kids with an American preferred name). The schools figure it out.
So I’ll ask them to refer to me as my preferred name and using he/him pronouns then, explaining that although my legal name still appears at the bottom (where it says DOB, gender and full name), I’m applying with my preferred name. Thank you!