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1. sotix+(OP)[view] [source] 2025-10-10 13:11:27
I'm not fully following. Are your last names extremely similar but different, and are you also maintaining citizenship in a foreign country that uses gendered last names? Because that's the crux of the issue. Otherwise it sounds like you might be discussing a tangentially related but different point.

I had a Greek friend born in America who was assigned her father's masculine gendered surname. Her birth was not registered in Greece. When she went to register in Greece as an adult, it created loads of issues due to her surname being incorrect from a Greek perspective. It required a lot of paperwork and fees be cause the Greek system was not set up at the time to handle that correctly.

On the flip side, her mother had a number of issues in the US having an almost identical yet different surname as her husband and daughter. Less extreme but frequently people would mess up the mom or the child's surname when entering records because they'd give the surnames a quick glance and incorrectly assume they were identical. She said there were often times where systems were designed with the faulty assumption that the child would have the same name as a parent.

Now, she effectively has two surnames depending on which passport she uses. Because it's easier for her to maintain names that correspond with the different systems.

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