I'm trans and have decided to use my chosen name and pronoun way ahead of the legal name change. For most parts, this went smoothly: colleagues and students alike adopted my new name, form of address and pronoun without notable issues.

Yet, three systems keep displaying my old name to the students and the world: The University Information System used for course planning and grading, the e-learning-platform, and the official University Website. The only option open to making changes would result in changes being "automatically overwritten daily by the identity management system".

Thus, infrastructure and a case of "this is the way the computer does it" puts us in a situation where we either have to have official documents and legal mail in a not-yet-legal name, or our dead names constantly being shown to people who do their best to respect our identities.

In the talk, I will discuss possible workarounds as well as technical solutions/changes which would make it possible to use chosen names within technically-managed infrastructure before (or without) a legal name change.