‘To assume another name’: Race, gender, family and name changing in New York City, 1887–2012

The name-change petitions housed in the New York City Civil Court allow us to see the ways that Jewish families, cisgender women and transgender people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries used state mechanisms to challenge institutionalised antisemitism and traditional definitions of family and gender. At the same time, however, the petitions also indicate the oppressive elements of the state, as these groups increasingly felt it necessary to undertake the emotional and physical labour entailed in official name changing to establish the personal identity and familial authority that cisgender men are granted automatically in US legal tradition.