We have a new son

We successfully got the petitions filed, the judge signed the orders, and this afternoon we legally have a 16-year-old son with a new name: Alyksandr Isaac Dawson Waring.

Everyone at the courthouse was helpful, and rather cheerful about getting our work done. I suppose when your work often involves things that leave people unhappy (e.g., divorce or child custody), doing something that somebody wants and makes them happy gives the day a little lift.

There were a couple of snags: the Gender Marker project hadn’t given us a draft the formal order for the judge to sign, I’m not sure why not. Fortunately, the clerk of the court said “let me see what I can do with the online law library” and in a few minutes he had pulled together a serviceable two-page order, using one that had been filed in another county as a template.

Then we got to sit and wait, while he found an associate judge to review and approve all the papers, and then get the district judge to finally approve and sign the order. It was an hour or more of sitting, and we had another trans woman in the office with us who had come up from San Marcos and was getting HER papers done, and she was excited and wanted to talk and talk AND talk. Fortunately L is gregarious and engaged her in chat, while Alyks retreated into the book he’d brought with him. I tried to do the same (Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States), but the prose was dense and the other woman was full of political naïveté and fatuities (she’s a college student, bless her heart, hasn’t yet had time for Life to knock some of the nonsense out of her) and my hip got to hurting, so I went out and stood in the hallway for a while, where it was cool and dim and people didn’t try to TALK to me.

Still, the waiting came to an end and the court clerk walked back in the office with our signed order making Alyks legally a boy, and sent us downstairs to get the district clerk’s office to make a bunch of certified copies we can wave under the noses of various fonctonnaires to change all his records. A and I went to the Social Security office this afternoon and applied for a new card for him, while L went to tackle the health department for a new birth certificate and the registrar at his school to change all his school records. I phoned my employer to get insurance and things changed. I’m sure we’ll have other places we have to go and things to do, but with the legal papers done it’ll be much less messy.

Mike Pence pretends to be the calculating sex toy. Fnord.