Due to her refusal to reveal her previous name, or “deadname,” (the title a transgender person was given at birth but no longer uses after their gender transition), one transgender woman claimed she was barred from running for office in the Ohio House of Representatives.
When Vanessa Joy, a 42-year-old real estate photographer, failed to include her last name in her campaign to work for Ohio House District 50, she was disqualified. According to Ohio law, candidates for public office who have changed their names in the previous five years must list those names on their petitions. The law does not discuss exemptions for transgender people who have changed their names, but it does exempt those whose names have been changed as a result of marriage.
Joy claimed that she was aware of the rules and submitted a petition on Thursday to challenge her disqualification. “It’s a barrier to entry for some transgender and female nonbinary people,” she said to NBC News. “Many trans people don’t want their deadnames printed, unlike me, who would have just bit the bullet and allowed my name to appear on petitions and possibly on ballots. I wanted to give teenagers, Gen X and Gen Z, the confidence to go out and vote and run for office themselves because it’s a safety issue for some. They might have more confidence to go out and vote and realize that ‘maybe my vote may make a difference’ if they see- ‘A trans woman from pretty red Ohio running for public office, in a chamber full of people who despise me for my existence.'”
Joy’s exclusion follows soon after Ohio garnered national attention for its transgender issues, with Republican Gov. Last year, Mike DeWine vetoed a GOP-backed bill that would have limited transgender women’s ability to play on school sports teams as well as transition-related care for minors. Some Republicans and former President Donald Trump both criticized DeWine’s veto, writing on his social media platform, Truth Social, “Dewine has fallen to the Radical Left. I won’t be endorsing him any longer, which is why he always receives raucous jeers in Ohio when I do so at Rallies. I’m done with this ‘RINO.’ What did he think? The legislation would have prohibited men from participating in women’s sports and stopped child amputation. Finally, legislation will reverse. Would it quickly! Ohio lawmakers are expected to challenge the veto in the coming months.
Credit for the newspaper: Leonid Andronov / Shutterstock.com
