On the 27th of August, the ANU Queer Department, in collaboration with ANUSA Welfare Officer Skye Predavec released the Deadnaming Report. The report includes a survey conducted for the purpose of understanding and assisting transgender students, who have faced deadnaming the ANU.
Deadnaming is the utilisation of the name assigned at birth to an individual who has changed their name since. It is most often an issue with transgender individuals, due to the higher than average utilisation of name-change procedures.
Predavec, who ran for Welfare Officer on the policy of addressing deadnaming within the ANU, told Woroni, “30 people answered the survey by the close of the report.”
She explained, “Because of both the small size of the transgender community and the fact that not all transgender people are affected by deadnaming from ANU systems (e.g. if they have already legally changed their name and updated it with the uni), we believe that this represents a significant and representative sample of the affected population.”
According to the survey, 97 percent of students who had changed their name on ANU servers had experienced deadnaming at one point, with incidents mainly occurring in residential halls (43 percent), followed by ANU Accessibility (40 percent) and student invoices (33 percent).
However, all of the systems mentioned in the survey, including, ANU on campus, Interactive Student Information System (ISIS), and Wattle among others, had some degree of deadnaming.
Participants in the report shared experiences of deadnaming within the ANU, with one expressing, “Had an instance where I had to give my deadname to try and gain card access to the spoon space because my name didn’t match the records held by ANU Security. My name had been changed in ISIS and on my uID for some months at that point.”
Another student shared, “Got dead named in an exam, the invigilator was saying that my ID and the name in their system didn’t match. Had to explain that my ID hadn’t been updated but they didn’t seem to understand, this was all during writing time in an exam.”
The report concludes, “It is clear that there is a systematic deadnaming problem with ANU systems, and that real action must be taken to remedy this.”
“In general, these will likely be issues with using the wrong data in constructing automated emails, giving the wrong systems access to people writing emails, and other issues that can be fixed with quite simple training or system structure modifications.”
The report has four recommendations:
- “That the ANU Undertake a holistic review of its IT systems, training and data in order to identify all areas where deadnaming regularly occurs and take steps to ensure that preferred names are used in any and all applicable areas
- That the ANU takes rapid action in remedying the issues already identified in this report with deadnaming, with special focus given to the particularly poor areas of Residential Halls, Accessibility, Invoices and QILT.
- That ANU Residential Halls:
- Ensure that all front-facing staff are given training on how to interact with
transgender residents in a sensitive manner, including ensuring that they
always used preferred names - End the practice of giving out deadnames in any circumstances where it is not
legally necessary, especially to Senior Residents
- Ensure that all front-facing staff are given training on how to interact with
- That the ANU systems for Scholarships, Alumni, Early Applications and Global
Programs be updated to ensure that they all have preferred names, and that their name fields are updated for students when those details are changed on ISIS.”
In an Instagram post, the ANU Queer* Department reported all four recommendations have received in-principle commitment from the University, with almost three recommendations in progress.
For the first recommendation, the “University has committed to making real change…and has already spread the report within ANU departments.” For the second recommendation, it is understood that the ANU “promptly took action”.
For the third recommendation, the Department reported, the Residential Experience Division met with ANUSA and the Queer* Department. It is understood that, “all front facing staff” at residential halls will be provided training in how to best support transgender individuals.
The Final recommendation that is being implemented is a reworking of the early access scheme in order to have the preferred names be transferred to ANU ISIS ensuring a lower risk of deadnaming.
Overall, the ANU enthusiasm to correct the issue has been taken as a positive step.
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