Positive Changes to Michigan Laws on Legal Name Changes

You may have heard that there were some positive bills passed in Michigan during the last legislature cycle - some good news to celebrate for a change!

Equality Michigan has provided some helpful information on these changes. These laws went into effect in early April. Prior to these changes, the name change process entailed getting fingerprinted and having a background check, having one's name change hearing information published in the newspaper, and attending a court hearing for the name change. These recent changes removed the expectation about having a background check, which reduces a burdensome process of needing to interact with police or other officials to get fingerprints and saves the applicant $43. Even before these changes, applicants could request that their name change not be published in the newspaper. To do so, they had to petition the court to ask that this requirement be waived and they had to provide good cause for this, often needing to share intimate details about traumatic events from their past in the petition to convince judges to agree. Now, applicants will still need to petition the court to waive the requirement for publishing the name change. However, this bill provides a more standardized expectation that judges approve the request if it is related to gender identity and so we hope this means that applicants will no longer have to revisit troubling details of events of their past in the petitions. The publication also costed about $64, so applicants will now have fewer fees in this process as well.

These legal changes also allow for judges to opt out of requiring a hearing for legal name changes that are related to gender identity. Because these changes are all so recent, we don't have a good sense of whether judges are going to be inclined to waive this requirement or not. This will be left up to each individual judge.

If you are a trans or nonbinary adult in Ingham County and want help with your name change, don't forget to sign up with our program, the Gender Affirmation Project. We cover the fees for the process and help you with all of the paperwork.

You can also find more details on the process on the court's website.