Think about the name that you are going to choose for yourself.
Pick something sensible: Scully is not sensible, you are too old to have been named by your parents after a recent television character.
Remember your age, and try to fit in with what would have been appropriate at the time of your birth.
You should also consider whether you want to change your surname. Some trans people choose to do so, and it is perfectly legal and acceptable … but if you want to maximise your privacy and make life easy, it may be better not to change your surname.
This may sound strange, but the reason is that if you do change your surname, the documentation will be more complicated when you obtain a gender recognition certificate.
(If you are not thinking of changing your surname, you may prefer to skip the rest of this page. The explanation is rather complicated!)
These complications mean that if you have to produce your birth cert, it will harder to maintain privacy about your transsexual history. Many trans people won’t mind about that, but you should consider whether it matters to you, or might matter in the future.
The effect on the documents depends on when you were born: procedures for birth certificates changed some time in 1969. The precise reasons are very complicated, but here’s a fuller explanation if you want it:
If you were born after 1969, your new birth certificate will show your new surname, which will be different to that of your parents. There are other people in this situation (not just trans people), but it is unusual. So it may mean that some questions are asked about your birth certificate—it may not matter very often, but it’s not a good situation to get into if you want to maximise your privacy.
The situations where this matters are rare, but it is something to consider.
If you were born before 1969, things get even more complicated if you have changed your surname.
Your original birth certificate does not record the child’s surname—in those days, a child was assumed to take the father’s name (if recorded), or the mother’s name if no father was recorded. That makes it difficult for anyone who had changed their surname, so you will be offered a choice between a post-1969-style birth certificate or the earlier format.
However, if you choose the post-1969 format, someone to whom you produce your birth cert may notice that a pre-1969 birth should not be recorded in that format, and might ask difficult questions.
So the registrar will offer you the choice of having a pre-1969-style birth cert, which will look the same as for other people born in the same era. This option would cause a lot of complications, so it looks like a bad option.
For example, suppose your parents were Janet and John Smith, who named you Ann, and when you transitioned your changed your name to Eric Jones. If you get a pre-1969-style birth cert, it will show your name as Eric, and your parents’ name as Smith so your name would be Eric Smith.
This would be difficult, because you were never known as that! You would now have a contradiction in your paper-trail: a statutory declaration which shows your name changing from Ann Smith to Eric Jones, and a birth cert for Eric Smith.
There could be two ways around this: