Okay friends, I need uni advice. So, anybody in the UK who has dealt with/knows how to deal with these problems, please message me?
Basically I just got into uni, but I’m not out yet. So EVERYTHING is using my birthname, and treating me as female. I want to sort this out before I actually join, so would anyone be willing to help me go through things please?
We don’t have to be mutuals or anything, I just really need help because this will contribute a lot to my happiness over the next three years.
I can more or less guarentee this is going to vary widely by intitustion. which means i can tell you how to go about this at nottingham and nowhere else (and i know how to do it while being a student not as prospective more so) so you need to ask for your uni specifically rather than uk universities in general. In theory your uni should acctually have a policy document on transgender students (and staff – might be a sparate document for that) which should be available online which may or may not be helpful for this.
Admissions are worth a go but i would leave that for a bit cause they are going to be very very busy right now. At the very least, you presumably have to register online (and then possibly in person when you get there) and i would wait to contact them til after you have seen what that looks like and what you can already put in. I would see what you can do with the registration form -there will at the very least be a field for prefered name (mostly cause that’s also used by international students who use an anglacised name rather than their legal one – which is a bigger group of people). You probably can’t change your legal name on there without a deed pol (and possibly ID) and you probably can’t change your listed gender on there without a letter from your doctor (or something similar, i believe my uni will accept a written statement from the student but i’m not sure) – it will probably also ask you sexual orientation and whether your gender matches that assigned at birth and a couple of other things these are for statistics rather than atatched to your student record (and you can put ‘prefer not to say’). Depending on the unis induvidual policy you may be able to get your prefered name on your university card ask someone at your uni or see if there is a policy document
The other people to contact, and who should be able to tell you specicifcally how to go about it at the uni you are at are the lgbt society/network – they should have a general address (which is fine to email as they’ll just forward it to whoever can answer best) but also may have a trans specific one or a welfare one you can email too. (also probably have a facebook page if you use it and you could message them there)
one thing that is a fairly universal problem (as in its a problem at my uni, and i know it is at york where my sister goes – and kirby mentioned this is where you are going but i could be wrong about that so you know) is that changing something centrally with the university will not change it everywhere, this is going to be most relivent for a legal name change or changing gender marker or title (this causes a load of problems with various stuff btw not just this and also means you have about 10 different uni services you have to log into separately, which is very annoying). You are already in several different university systems (information from ucas) and while in theory chnging the central one shoudl change all of them that would make it too easy it is worth checking because that is not always the case. That’s something that is easier to do when you are there unfortunately but it should be reasonably easy to check prior to enrolling that your deparatmental administration has got the update to your info because you should be able to contact them directly (its often just a case of going ‘hey go check the central system and update this please’) they may have done, they may not so check. similarly email should be easy to get sorted prior but a warning that you may log in to random systems that until you get there you dont know exist and find the information there hasnt updated.
fearlessstateofmind backup 