Today and tomorrow, I’ve been pulled out of my courtroom to handle Law & Motion, which is a specialized courtroom that not a lot of clerks are trained to handle. I asked the judge in Law & Motion about half an hour ago how he prefers his papers to be organized in the name change files. He said it doesn’t matter, once I’ve checked over the name change requests and verified that all the criteria have been met, the only thing he really looks at is the reason for the name change. I said that the best reason I’d seen in my experience as a Law & Motion clerk is that a guy had to change his name because he changed his gender. The judge chuckled and said that when he was in his last courtroom, he kept looking over papers for this one petition in which they kept referring to the “wife” as “he”, or somehow the pronoun didn’t seem to match the spouse they were talking about. He thought they’d made a mistake on their papers, until the hearing when he learned that the husband WAS male and then he went through a gender change operation and became a female, but they were still married. I said, “Well, that’s nice that they were still able to remain married. That’s an understanding wife to say, ‘You’re gonna make me a lesbian? Okay.’ ”

And then I start reviewing my name change files on calendar to be heard tomorrow morning in here.

Name change #1:
Mom wants to change her name and her 5-year-old son’s name. All they’re doing is adding a hyphenated 2nd last name to their own last name. This is common, they usually do this when the mom gets remarried, so that the whole family has the same last name. That’s what’s stated in the “reason for name change”, too. The petition says that both parents are petitioning to change the minor’s last name. I look at the parents’ names. The first parent, of course, is the mom who’s also getting her own name changed. The 2nd parent, on the line that says “father’s name/address”, they had “father’s” crossed out and they’d written in the name of a woman who has the last name they want added to their last names by hyphenation. It’s a lesbian couple that wants the boy to have their last name. I’m sorry, this other woman is not the child’s biological father, no matter if they consider her to be the 2nd parent and crossed off “father” in the information. The natural father needs legal notice that his son’s name is being changed. So I’m gonna have to talk to them tomorrow when they come in for the hearing.

Name change #2:
A man whose first name is John wants to change his first name to something that looks really gender ambiguous. It’s a name I’d never heard of. The reason for the change states that it’s the name that he was given at birth, and he wants to change it back to that instead of “John.” The criminal assessment report shows that he has an a.k.a. of…Joan.

I don’t work in West Hollywood jurisdiction. This is NOT common for our name changes. I’m not even going to look at name changes #3 and #4 today, so that I’m 2 for 2 today.

James is continously floored by how every time I talk about something, it happens. In fact, we talked about that phenomenon yesterday. And look at this whopper today!