M.T. transitioned to being a girl when she was a minor, and at 19, legally changed her name. Three years later, she was harassed and outed on social media by someone who had looked up her name change petition online, so the next year, she moved to seal her name change materials.
The trial court refused to do so. The Court of Appeal reverses.
Justice Meehan's opinion doesn't establish a categorical rule that says that all name-and-gender petitions have to be sealed; rather, you gotta look at this stuff case-by-case. We generally make name change petitions public because we don't want people changing their names to defraud creditors, escape the police, etc.
But this girl isn't doing any of that. She transitioned as a minor. She changed her name at 19 for fully permissible reasons. There's no reason why the public needs access to what she was originally called (her "deadname") name, and permitting easy public access allows people to look up current names and link them up to old names to "out" folks as transgendered. So public interest in that, thank you very much, and big downsides, as the individualized harassment here reflects.
So, in my view, a very well-written and sensible opinion by Justice Meehan -- one that could have easily gone off the rails in either political direction, but doesn't.
