Because I live in the Netherlands and all my legal stuff with Germany has to go over the notoriously slow general consulate in Amsterdam, I was only able to make my declaration of name and gender change on the 11th of November 2024, though those 10 days of course didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Still, because the general consulate is only a consulate, everything had to be mailed to Germany first and in the end it took over a month for the confirmation to arrive in my mail. Senna and me came back and this is when I finally got to unbox the letter I had waited for, for so long:
One thing that was not the point of the video, but provides a very stark contrast to where I am at now is the amount of weight I lost. This was in early December, less than three months before I learned that a BMI of less than 30 kg∕m² was a requirement to even get onto the waiting list for bottom surgery, not just for the surgery itself and started an extreme diet that lost me 35 kg over four months. Looking back at this video, I’m very happy about that too.
In any case, once this change was done I could request another appointment with the consulate to request a new passport and a new ID, which ended up on the 28th of February, six days before my PhD-Defense. At that point I decided to wait one more week and have my doctor added into them, which we ended up treating as me “fogetting” the diploma and mailing it as soon as I had it. The good news was that I had at that point already managed to swap my driver’s license for a new Dutch one, which at least in the Netherlands counts as a valid form of ID, ending a period of about two month in which I did not have an ID in my actual legal name…