Becoming Alexis - Part One

The Beginning

My name is Alex Berel Lemberg, at least for now. I am 36 years old and live with my husband, a chosen family member, and our incredible dog in the Castro District of San Francisco, California. I am a genderqueer nonbinary person, assigned male at birth, six-foot-two, two-fifty right now, and with a penchant for colorful and dramatic fashion. This is the first in a series of blog posts describing my experience in the world of name and gender changes, as the founder of Identity Affirmation Workshop, and through my own personal journey.

In 2018, in my first year as an attorney, I was contacted by an old friend who wanted to change his name. I figured, I’m good at paperwork, I can figure out how to do this. So, I did. I filed a petition with the Superior Court in Los Angeles and helped him update his birth certificate and Social Security record. At the time, I worked extreme hours at a legal services nonprofit, and so this first case was just a favor to a friend.

As I represented 35-60 low-income tenants at a time in eviction defense, habitability, tenant harassment, Rent Board arbitrations, and Section 8 and public housing hearings, my bandwidth was low, but other friends, knowing I had recently passed the bar exam, began asking for help with this process too. Soon enough, I helped a friend-of-a-friend, and then another.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as it did for many, made me rethink my life. I had learned an extraordinary amount in my first few years of practice, but I had also burned out quite severely. I lost my grandmother, after a years-long decline with Alzheimer’s, in late 2019, who was always the most supportive adult in my life. By late 2020, I formulated an exit plan from my nonprofit practice. In the summer of 2021, I decided to start my own solo legal practice and rented an office in the heart of San Francisco’s most famous LGBTQ+ neighborhood, the Castro, where I have also lived since 2013. I had done enough name and gender change petitions by this point that I decided I would extend a public-facing offer of free legal assistance for name and gender change petitions.

I also first publicly acknowledged my non-binary identity in early 2021, changed my gender marker on all my important documents that year, and began exclusively using they/them pronouns in 2022. My given name, Alex, had always been non-binary enough for me, or at least not at either end of the gender binary. In 2022, I hosted a booth at San Francisco Trans March, at Dolores Park, and met several new clients, including my first under-18 clients.

I have consistently had an increasing number of name-and-gender change clients since I began working with people and unintentionally became the foremost expert in California in this area of the law. In mid-2023, I started a new nonprofit organization called Identity Affirmation Workshop, with the intent of bringing my pro bono legal assistance statewide in California. The more clients I worked with, the more I understood the need for the work I was doing. This year, 2024, I have been devoting more time and resources to IAW and helping it grow. I always try to insist on meeting all of my name and gender change clients at least once, and I’ve now helped over 100 people. The more I practice in this area, the broader view I’m getting of the entire process and all it entails. The most important lesson for me has been that changing names and genders is a deeply personal and emotional process and that humanity must be placed first and foremost, before the endless list of tasks.

The last several years have been extremely intense for me. I’ve been in lots of therapy working through my childhood trauma and abuse and all of the aftermath that caused me as a young adult, I lost both grandmothers back-to-back and then my mom at the end of 2022. I just finished four years as President of my neighborhood association, am finishing out my term on an important City Commission, am wrapping up my mom’s estate, and wrapping up several outstanding projects, as well as finally dealing with my intense grief. I have lots more to write about, regarding the terrifying toxic cesspool that is San Francisco politics, my personal journey, and some other writing I’ve recently been inspired to begin, but this series is not about me and my struggles. Well, except one.

I recently decided to take some time for myself, to really feel and experience my grief in an effort to move on and reclaim some of my agency and joy. Last week, I decided to begin the process of changing my own name. I have been drawing on the strength of my clients for years, getting to know them and helping them through some tough problems, knowing that I had to wait for the right moment to do it for myself. The right moment is now.

Although it isn’t official yet, I want to reintroduce myself. My name is Alexis Blythe Levy. My given name, Alex, was never short for anything. In 2009, I created my drag persona, Alexis Von Fierce. Although I do not identify as a woman, then or now, Ms. Von Fierce helped me connect with other parts of myself that I hadn’t explored. I performed often for over three years and hosted a weekly show for about 18 months. Alexis was a part of myself that I identified and only felt safe being in its own context. Rather than being its own context, I decided that Alex could be short for Alexis. You can still call me Alex, but I admit being very fond of being called Alexis. Blythe was picked among names starting with B that I liked and means “joyous” or “cheerful”; I wanted to maintain my initials, ABL, as a tribute to my mother who gave me the initials spelling most of the word “able,” and to which I added the ultimate E when I became an Esquire. Levy is my maternal grandmother’s married name, and my mother’s maiden name. I identify much more strongly with my grandmother and her life than I do with my previous last name and want to honor her in the strongest possible way, by taking her chosen name.

Suffice to say, I have experienced some wild adventures with my name and gender change clients over the years, with unique blockages, surprise information, hostile courts, and mental health struggles. This is why IAW represents clients in court in their petitions: there are just so many things that can unexpectedly go wrong, and having an attorney representing you can make a huge difference.  Ultimately, their stories are not mine to tell, especially as an attorney bound to confidentiality. I know I could ask people to share their stories, but I just won’t do that. Being transgender or gender-diverse is hard enough on its own without attention being drawn to your story, and I don’t want to rely on publicizing my clients’ struggles to engage in fundraising activities or public information campaigns.

When I started my own name and gender change process, though, I quickly realized that I could share my own experiences. I’ve become an expert in this subject-matter area over the last several years, but there is still much for me to learn. Sharing authentic lived experiences is one of the best ways to advocate for meaningful change both in the law and in social change. I quickly noted that my name change journey will be more complicated and time-consuming than it is for many, as I hold multiple state licensures, run a business using my name as its title as well as its goodwill, have complicated finances, and maintain a broader internet presence than many.

What I plan to do is chronicle my personal journey and share it with the world. I hope that my story can be helpful to others on their own journey and to raise awareness about the challenges that trans and gender-diverse people face. I can’t think of a better way to help people understand two things: first, that professional resources in this area are necessary; and, second, highlight the massive undertaking this process is, even for someone who has helped over 100 people do the same and raise awareness of how this process works and where it could improve.

One of my passions is advocacy. I am honored to work with a huge variety of the most amazing transgender, non-binary, two-spirit, third gender, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and other gender-diverse people and I am always looking for ways to increase my reach. In this time, when trans and gender-diverse people are under constant attack in society, having their rights stripped and social status lowered, I feel the need to stand up for this community that I have slowly become part of myself, who suffer from widespread discrimination and hate, who have a harder time finding stable jobs and housing and family life, and who are constantly being targeted by many different facets of society. I’m extremely grateful to have the ability to help; I’m well-educated, hard-working, and lucky in many ways. I am privileged and have the necessary knowledge and resources to do all this by myself, but also to build an ever-expanding resource so that people who can’t do this on their own can still do this important work. As I grow Identity Affirmation Workshop into a zero-barrier way to access free legal help and financial assistance, statewide and hopefully, eventually, nationwide, I keep in mind the reason that this work is so important: it literally saves lives to identify as who you truly are. Governmental agencies and corporations do not have the incentive to ensure that everyone has access to the ability to affirm their identity, nor is it even on the list of priorities. But I know it is, and I’m also grateful that a group of amazing former clients has agreed to work with me on the IAW board of directors to help expand our services and ensure that anyone who needs help changing their name or gender marker has the ability to access assistance.

I drafted my court petition last Wednesday, May 29, in about 25 minutes. I went to the courthouse to file it later that afternoon. I have drafting court petitions down to a science. It’s everything that comes after the court order that is intimidating. No, really, I made a spreadsheet of everything that I’m going to have to do. It’s long. Stay tuned.

I thank you for reading this and for joining me on this series I call Becoming Alexis.