Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my personal life history grounded in the gendered performativity of the patronym, I question a biopolitics of names that would erase Greek diasporic female to male trans temporalities and discuss the implications of such a disappearing archive for documenting transmasculine lives

Paper long abstract:

Remembering my trans-Atlantic voyage to Canada from Athens Greece in the mid-1950s and the concomitant Anglicization of my Greek surname, I encounter the violence of forced forgetting in the Age of Trans.

This paper seeks to expose and contest obstacles to the visibility of trans men and trans masculine embodiments that the Americanization of Greek patronymic names in Canadian naturalization citizenship documents poses for archiving trans lives and their trajectories, in the context of new administrative policies pertaining to name changes for Canadian immigrants today.

Played out against the backdrop of the current celebratory response to recent amendments to the civil code in Québec pertaining to protocols for changing name and gender marker on identity documents without surgery, my paper reflects upon the "impossible identities," contradictions and conflicting truth-obligations encountered by marginalized non-native trans men who are, since 2014, required by law to make retro-active name changes on naturalization certificates as a pre-condition for passport applications under their current legal name status, masculine embodiment, and identity as reflected on official identity documents issued by provincial agencies.

Drawing on my personal life history grounded in the gendered performativity of the patronym, I question a biopolitics of names that would erase Greek diasporic female to male trans temporalities and discuss the implications of such a disappearing archive for documenting transmasculine lives