A transgender woman running for an Ohio House seat has been disqualified for failing to disclose her former name on petitions circulated to voters, in violation of a seldom-enforced state law.
Local election officials informed Vanessa Joy, who hoped to run as a Democrat for Ohio House District 50, that she was not eligible to do so, despite having collected the signatures necessary to run.
Joy sought to run in a firmly Republican district covering Stark County, just south of Akron.
It sounds like I might be! I didn’t know they were public info, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? lol
So could the public look up your new name and get the old info still? That’s really the furthest extent of my concerns. Just would want to make sure that people couldn’t hide bad pasts, but can still have due privacy
Not really. It was traditional to publish it out of the way of where you lived. So like you’d pick a small town’s small local paper and it’s there, but it requires looking and most people aren’t going to bother. And it’s not like we’re trying to hide our pasts completely, more, it’s painful to us so we’d like to minimize our interaction with it and the degree to which it impacts us.
People can find my deadname but it’s not easy. And by not easy I don’t mean “serious investigative journalism” I mean “pulling court records”. A journalist can do it easily, and an everyday citizen can do it with reasonable inconvenience.
And beyond all that, yeah it would be no more difficult to find my past than that of a woman who took her spouses name. Ok it would be more difficult, but that’s because my present is apparently very difficult to find online. I’m a quite private person.
Totally wasn’t meaning to imply anyone would was hiding their pasts, I totally get why trans people want to shed something they’re not aligned with, even if it’s just a name to some people, to trans people it’s a lot more than that.
I used to be called all sorts of slurs that weren’t my name and I know how wearing that can be. Forget about a whole ass identity tied to a name. I couldn’t imagine