My entire career has involved working with data in one form or another. My first job when I was fresh faced out of University was working on search technologies in the late 90’s with the darling of Silicon Fen, Autonomy, headed by the somewhat controversial Michael Lynch. We worked on technology which allowed unstructured data to be searched using Bayesian statistics using an enterprise quality search engine called IDOL.
Since that point in the Fens, I’ve remained in data in one form or another moving from Cambridge to the landlocked country of Laos (where I worked on Crystal Reports in the sweltering heat) to Realise in Edinburgh, Solstice in Chicago, and finally found my home at Valtech where I’ve been for nearly 20 years. Throughout my tenure I’ve worked on Databases, Search technologies, Platform Engineering, Front-End and Back-End stacks and now my focus is on AI-based technologies such as Google VAIS and Gemini. I know and understand data; how it’s processed and how’s it’s used and more importantly how it shouldn’t be used and processed.
My professional experience is why I’m utterly baffled as to how badly designed a lot of systems are when it comes to defining data points such as titles, name, usernames and email addresses as immutable . The sheer insanity of customer facing corporate systems have sucked up a lot of my time and made my life much more complicated than it really needed to be.
I have some personal experience in battling these design decisions because I’m one of the less than 1% of the UK population who is a trans woman. I transitioned at a later point in my life than a lot of people do and given my career, techy nature and my age I have accumulated a LOT of digital detritus in my life from multiple email addresses, a million online accounts for shops, service providers, gaming accounts etc. We’re not even talking about the official online systems that need to interact with on a regular basis such as government IDs, NHS accounts, DVLA, HMRC and Credit Scoring agencies.
I gave up using the same username and password for multiple accounts when my details showed up one too many times in https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and started using a password manager. Looking at this file it seems that I have thousands of different accounts that I’ve used over the years and I guess I’m not alone in this. I’m glad I started using a password manager as it was a good start to indicate where I need to make changes. Every single site has asked for my name, my title, my address, my email address and occasionally my gender. Some have asked for a username and some have generated a username from the details given and all of these things need to change when you transition.
Many of these accounts have been tied to my original Gmail address and because I wasn’t really aware of the fact that I COULD transition (ask me about Section 28, it’s fun!). I registered my Gmail account with my full birth name as my email address. I was one of the early adopters of Gmail so it was one of those rare email addresses which didn’t contain any numbers. Whilst this was great at first, tying them all to this account was a fundamentally stupid decision in hindsight because of the sheer amount of work needed to change them all when it turned out that my birth name wasn’t the name I’d end up with.
I was married before I transitioned and being a modern type of person, I refused to ask my then-wife to take on my surname as it felt far too much like ownership, We both double-barrelled our names and blessed our child with a posh sounding name. As such I had to change my surname in multiple places and given the effort in doing this, the surname was only changed in really important places and I left a lot of the old accounts alone.
Many data systems are built to account for this as a wife taking on a husband’s surname is fairly common in this western patriarchal society and it’s a common use case and typically account for in most customer service handbooks. Double-barrelling two longish surnames actually caused some problems because the systems weren’t built to have long surnames and this was it’s own challenge but minor in the grand scheme of things.
Changing my surname, on the whole, didn’t involve much in the way of required documentation, the service providers tended to accept it without too much evidence (unless we are talking legal entities such as banks or the NHS or DVLA etc). When I divorced I needed to reverse these changes and again, spent a lot of my spare time correcting the data back to what it was previously.
As I think about it whilst writing this article, the entire process seemed easy and it was relatively amusing to me when it comes to comparing the sheer hell of having to change my name, gender, title and email address when I finally found the courage to transition at the age of 45. Dear reader, I hope you never have to go through the hell of explaining to the 10th customer service representative in a single day that yes, your voice is deeper than most cis-women and yes, you are the named person on the account and yes, you want to change your details to be correct and yes, you are Ms not Mr. This process went on for literal months as I discovered more data that needed correcting.
What I’ve found is with my my travels through data is that so many systems treat your email address or username as utterly immutable and use it as a key to other systems. Whilst this can be considered to be immutable in a lot of cases, there are many reasons why people change their first names and email addresses, transition is just a small percentage of cases but no systems really entertain the possibility of this needing to happen. It’s quite common for people to lose access to their email accounts through bad password management or just sheer bad luck with the increasing complexity of living in a digital world. People change their names to hide from abusive partners and family.
For those of you who have some understanding of transgender issues, we tend to really dislike being “dead-named”, this means that after changing our name, the constant reminder that you had a different name (and gender) is, at best, discombobulating and at worst, really emotionally jarring and traumatic to an extent. I’ve written extensively on what it takes to transition and I won’t repeat it here however, to summarise, I don’t particularly want my original birth name to be known. Since the toxic culture wars started, there is a tendency for people who don’t believe that transition is a valid thing for somebody to try to use this as a weapon against you. Quite why they care is still beyond me but humans are a weird bundle of neurotic neurons sometimes.
Personally, I am proud of being trans and find strength in the battles I’ve undertaken and won in order to live true and authentically. I think it’s important to talk about it as I have no wish for anybody to go through the battles that I’ve had with myself and unpicking all of the traumatic depiction of trans folk that I grew up with, absorbing that negativity into my psyche. All that being said, it’s difficult and still honestly weird to think of myself as being anything other than the woman I am and the name I have. The previous identity blurs into the past. Semi-regular emails or correspondence with my dead name can be somewhat triggering and each random mail out that I forgot about leads to me re-doing the process for yet another forgotten system (several years later). I hope to have completed the process before I move onto the next plane of existence but the chances are there’ll be a lot of things I’ve missed and my digital ghosts will remain in long forgotten systems.
Some companies make it IMPOSSIBLE to change your username. I’ll give you an example with a well known bank. The bank uses the idea of a username in order to allow users to find one another and generate referral codes (with the promise of you and your referee being gifted a small amount of money). When I changed my name I dutifully provided my witnessed deed poll (which is all you actually need to change your name in the UK) and my updated passport. The bank changed the name on my account without much fuss. However, when it came to my username, there wasn’t an automated way of doing this and I needed to speak to customer services to try to facilitate this. As was my habit, I used a variation of my dead name and after a little wrangling managed to get this updated to the new name. What I didn’t actually expect, 6 months later, was when I sent a referral code to a close friend to add her as a new customer (I mean, who doesn’t love free money), the referral link contained my deadname encoded in the URL. If this had been for a less trusted friend it would have been a massive breach of trust for me and caused huge problems. As such I complained to the bank and was told that it was impossible to change the referral link to not-deadname-me, even though it was originally built from the username (which had been subsequently updated).
These are the things that engineers don’t seem to realise or consider when building these systems, systems should NEVER rely on customer data to uniquely identify and store data. It’s not difficult to have a lookup table of GUID and names. This bank is not even a legacy bank with years and years of technical debt, it’s a relative newcomer to the market and this sort of mistake should have been accounted for by the data architects.
One of the worst attempted name changes involved the aforementioned Google account. Google do not let you change your Gmail address and also correspondingly tie EVERYTHING to your Gmail address. Since buying an Android phone and tying myself into the Google eco-system, my online file storage, my entire collection of photographs was all tied into this specific email address. As a dedicated Google user (please don’t judge me) I pay money to have extra storage and it comes with technical support. I spent a long time talking to them about this and the only way was to download EVERYTHING onto my local machine (via the Google Takeout functionality) and then re-upload to a new account with the correct name. Even with fast internet, 120Gb of photos takes a long time to sort out. You then need to obviously repoint every external single account to your new email address. Mail aliases are not a hard thing to implement and nor would a an actual change of email address but this was not a thought when the consumer system was built.
Since writing this article there has been word that Google are finally allowing users to change their email addresses but this hasn’t happened yet in my region and is slowly rolling out world-wide. It would have saved me a huge amount of time if they’d had this in place in the early days but it does look like things are changing for the better, finally you can change that embarrassing email chosen after half a bottle of red wine when you were 19 to something more suitable for giving out to actual adults (or in my case, remove the deadname).
Microsoft do not get a pass in this area either, whilst it’s relatively easy to change your email address, title, name and gender for your Microsoft account, there are tricky parts which surface as you delve more into the process. Let me take you back a while to the days before Zoom totally cornered the market in video conferencing.
I, like most of my generation, had a Skype account. Before Zoom, Microsoft decided to purchase the company and integrate in into the Microsoft ecosystem. This had several benefits such a single sign on and integrating well with your Hotmail account (remember them?). There was a simple one-click mechanism to link your Skype and Microsoft accounts. There used to have the concept of a Skype username (which again was my full dead name) and this was used by friends to locate you and handily could be used to locate your Microsoft account if you didn’t change the default settings. Recently I discovered that this linking still existed in the depths of my Microsoft account when installing MS Teams, despite Skype being mothballed in May 2025. When I spoke to customer support there was NO WAY to remove or rename my dead Skype account from my updated Microsoft account without deleting my ENTIRE MICROSOFT ACCOUNT. I escalated this and have added a feature request but the useless association still remains. Whilst this may seem more trivial to delete your Microsoft account than the hell I experienced with Google, it was actually worse as my Xbox, One Drive, OS licenses etc were associated with this account and there’s no way to easily transfer the associated data to a new, clean account.
Please, I beg of you designers, think about this.
Spotify use, again, immutable usernames and as such everything for your account is tied to that username. They have various bit of social functionality built into the codebase and as such this username is visible in several places (especially when you share playlists with people). To rectify this issue I needed to create a brand new account and get customer services to copy across all of my history and playlists. The history used to feed the algorithm used to recommend tracks to you could not be copied across so that was an annoying loss for several months until my usage got to such a point where the recommendations were valid again.
Did you know that driving license numbers encode the gender of the person in them? The seventh and eighth characters in the license number give the month of your birth and your gender. This is simply the birth month if you are male but has 50 added if you are female. For example a male born in May will have 05 as the 7th and 8th character of their license number. If they were female it would be 55 instead. For those born in December it would be 12 (male) and 62 (female). My guess is that when these systems were built then storage was not as cheap as it is now and this was simply a cost saving exercise (every byte used to count in the old days of data science)
Whilst this might surprise you, updating my gender and name at HMRC was actually easy, I’m glad to report that I didn’t need a new National Insurance number (I cannot imagine what hell that would have caused behind the scenes) with regards to pension contributions and the like.
Credit scoring agencies are fun treasure troves of incorrect information and whilst I think I’ve managed to correct the data in most places there’s still an issue with one of the agencies where my credit score was nuked because they didn’t manage to integrate the changes from my council with their systems, the result is that I’ve only been on the electoral register for a short period of time (despite in actuality being consistent for nearly 20 years). A large number of correspondence has been sent about this matter but still the bad data persists and it’s getting to a point where the issue is becoming moot. I’ve recently discovered that both my current name and deadname exist on my credit report so I’m having to now try to work out how to resolve this as this is privileged information.
The other billion online companies with my personal data
This feels like a Sisyphean task to update everything everywhere, for many places I’ve just asked for my data to be deleted and I’ll recreate it when necessary. I tried to find simple ways to update my email address or username but a scary number of systems do not support such a thing (or at least the customer support staff doesn’t know how to action it).
At the end of the day, your data NEEDS to be accurate to adhere to GPDR and you as the customer should have full control of your data. If a customer decides to delete their data because of your inadequate systems then it’s actually YOUR loss as you lose valuable data about a customer’s interactions with your service, data, especially now, is increasingly valuable when making business decisions and if your data is wrong or incomplete then you will be making invalid assumptions.
Pronouns are fun! You probably have never ever considered that your pronouns are different to how people see you, most people align with the sex they were assigned at birth and your pronouns are merged into your consciousness from an early age and remain unchanging throughout your life.
If you’re trans, then this is unlikely to be true. People use all kind of variations for their pronouns and your system needs to account for them ALL (or allow people to self-describe). You may think that pronouns are kinda irrelevant but they often hold DEEP meaning to somebody who has come to the realisation that they’re not actually cis-gendered (as in whether they are the sex that they were assigned at birth).
If you think they don’t matter, see how you feel when somebody describes you incorrectly because of a heavy implication about whether you fit the predefined category, trust me on this, you’ll soon get angry when it happens enough.
Do you need to hold information about somebody’s sex or gender? Do you really? Why are you asking for this information? Is it actually relevant when providing service to somebody or is it for statistics that the C-Suite want to look at once and then disregard? (the same actually could be said for Passports and Government ID but I’ll leave this spicy discussion for another article in the future).
Gender
One of the most offensive things I’ve ever come across has been on a form for a skin care cream where I was asked my Sex (they meant Gender actually). The options on the form were:
Do you understand why this is offensive? Answers on a postcard please (showing my age here).
The answer is thus:
Transwoman/Transgirl/Transman/Transboy are offensive terms because they other people. With this theoretically simple question you are saying to your customers that you don’t consider trans women to be women (note the space) and you don’t consider trans men to be men. Woman is a category and cis or trans woman is a sub-category of woman. Both are valid and both are descriptive of the specific flavour of woman.
If this is confusing then ask yourself this:
Would you use “blackwoman” and woman? Or Left hander and Normal person?
No, of course you wouldn’t, it’s hugely discriminatory and the unwritten implication is that there are women and black women and they not the same category of human.
If you really, really, need to ask this information (again, if you ACTUALLY need to know this) then you can ask
The prefix Cis is only an insult if you consider Trans to be an insult. Anybody who feels offended by the term Cis really needs to check their privilege.
Sex is a separate issue largely and isn’t as simple as you might imagine. If your biology education finished as GCSE level then you might be still under the impression that there are two sexes, male and female. I’d hope that you’d have educated yourself further by this time in your life but it’s never as simple as that (despite what the bigots will tell you). There are a lot of natural variations which exist in the natural world (both in humans and non-humans) and it’s never as simple as Male or Female.
You might be tempted to fall back to “biological Male” and “biological Female” but this doesn’t really make any sense as “biological” can refer to
As a trans woman I’m biologically female in many ways, 3 out of the 4 above for sure, I don’t know what my chromosomes look like, most people don’t. HRT actually changes your DNA and protein expression. Recent studies have shown that it also changes things such as the muscles in your heart so that your chance of heart attack is much more similar to cis women and than cis men.
You may say, yes, I’m Male or Female but are you really? Do you know for sure? You might well be intersex? The percentage of intersex humans in the world is pretty equal with the number of red haired humans. It’s totally feasible for non XX/XY karyotypes to have children and it’s these variations are much more common than you might like to think. Lots of people don’t actually realise that they are and it’s one of the reasons that they stopped karyotype testing professional sports people as it was opening a lot of cans of worms that people weren’t prepared for.
When building data systems which involve any type of personal data
Understand that you will be judged as a company if you get the above wrong and you will lose business over it (from the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies). Being ethical is the right thing and the only thing to do!
We need to be human centered in all that we do.
In the end, what’s the point of it all if we’re not trying to make the world better to live in?
Thank you for taking the time to read this, love and good vibes to you.
Kat