Not long now

Only four weeks to go now, 31 days as I write this post until I start living and working full time as Jenna.

Next Thursday all of my immediate work colleagues will know about my plans for gender reassignment. From what I've been hearing there are quite a few people that know already. The other day I was told that my project managers boss has known for something like 2 months.

As soon as my colleagues have been told I'll be off on leave until the 9th January when Jenna will return to work.

Notifying people that I've changed my name has been an interesting experience.

A number of places its simply been a case of changing details online and I've not needed a Deed Poll or other form of notification that I've changed my name.

A couple of times its meant that the easiest way to deal with the change is to delete an account or remove myself from a register and then create a new account or add myself to a register again under my new name. The latter is what I did with the Organ Donor Register.

So far the only people that I've had to supply my Deed Poll to have been the bank (all I need to do is to tell them when I want my account details changed and it will all happen automatically), DVLA (for my driving license), store card, a health insurance policy and the Land Registry because I own my house.

There are bound to be people that I've not informed of the change of name and so I expect I'll be getting post in my old name for quite some time to come, although I'm sure scrawling "Not known at this address" on most of it and posting it back will deal with most of that.

Its been interesting going through this process as its given me a good idea of just how many people know of our existence, even if it is just being registered on a computer system somewhere. Next time I read a story or see a film where someone erases a person's identity then I'm just going to laugh out loud because its not an simple as its made out to be.