Austin Community College recognizes that faculty, staff, and students may use names other than their legal name to identify themselves. The ACC chosen name process allows students to request use of a chosen first name where possible.
Juniper Maldonado, a student intern on the LAHC MOP team (Marketing, Outreach, and Promotion), shares their positive reflections on the ACC chosen name process.
Hello, My Name is Juniper
I can really only speak to my own experience, my own name. Earlier this year, I came to terms with my identity: I am non-binary. I feel no particular animosity toward any other gendered expression of self, but if the question is multiple choice then I am none of the above.
It is dreadfully inconvenient to be honest in one’s feelings, regardless of how long they’ve taken brewing and bubbling to the surface. My bubble happened to burst when the spring semester had just gotten underway.
Whether or not I should have felt anxious, or deceitful, or unsafe going into classes where no one knew about my existential shift is not a matter for debate, because I did. Being referred to as someone I was not was a soul-grinding stress that so many of us have been conditioned to ignore. It’s an unfair and unfortunate belief to be considered somehow at fault for one’s own feelings and conception of self. At the very least I felt at fault for being so caught between wanting to stand firmly in my identity, be the next piece of pride, and being eaten up by doubt and uncertainty.
But I cannot express to you how much I needed the softness of my transition, the solitude of my own council; I had to find a path on my own, in my own way, or else it would not have been mine. Finding any path at all is difficult enough when there is a wall of separation between the self and the culture, the self and conversation, the self and the name.
I chose Juniper because it held no obvious masculine or feminine conventions, yet was still reminiscent of the name I was born with, because after all, I had not actually changed. I was merely shifting the perspective of my life to one that would give me agency over misery.
Nowhere have I ever been more fortunate than at ACC. I have had so many experiences that I will always remember with a sense of gratitude, though few more than the Academic Cooperative I participated in this past spring. It was taught by Charlotte Gullick, a professor I was already familiar with as a creative writing major, and the classmates I had were nothing if not amicable. This was the first occasion I attempted to go by my chosen name; in my other classes I did not speak, I did not want to be known.
Even in the Cooperative class, it was not easy. My email, Blackboard account, and listing on the attendance sheet all referred to the wrong person. For as valiant the effort was to respect my identity within that class, it was still confusing and frustrating to simply be labeled wrong in the systems by which courses are run. Guilty time was taken to reintroduce and explain as I started to feel more and more resigned to the idea that this was just the price I would have to pay if I wanted to identity as myself, and that it might be better to just let myself recede, namelessly, to the back.
Thankfully, one of my classmates was also an ACC employee and was sympathetic to what I was going through. As soon as he heard about the new chosen name process, he told me. It was so simple, but it meant everything. I could sign my name without fear of question or lost assignments. I could answer honestly to the roll call. I became unafraid and unresigned in all of my classes.
Without the constant betrayal of my name I was able to give myself the room to grow into the person and self I’ve always wanted to be; alongside my goals for education, not apart from or instead of. As this year has gone on, I’ve gotten better at knowing when and where to have more exploratory conversations. I’ve been allowed a graceful time to turn all of my feelings to just the right angle to know them and express them.
ACC’s chosen name process allowed me that simple and fundamental dignity. They allowed me my name.