J.D. Vance, the newly-announced Republican nominee for Vice President, is facing criticism for changing his name while also opposing certain demands of the transgender lobby.
The author of Hillbilly Elegy, who is now a senator from Ohio, has been consistently conservative on the current crop of popular transgender issues. He has, for example, introduced a bill that would remove “X” as a gender option from the US passport. He has also supported bills that would criminalize furnishing gender transition surgery or cross-sex hormones to minors.
Critics who are annoyed about that part of his political career have seized upon a part of Vance’s life that has not received a lot of public scrutiny, though the information is a matter of public record: while he was a student at Yale University, Vance legally changed his surname from Hamel to Vance.
In the eyes of the trans activist community, this is significant, as Vance took control of how he would be addressed, which is an important part of the nest of rituals surrounding chosen genders and trans names.
Vance’s name change was occasioned by his desire to be more closely identified with Bonnie Blanton Vance, his maternal grandmother who helped raise him and provide stability in his life while his mother struggled with various substance dependencies. Vance’s mother’s first husband, Donald Bowman, was Vance’s father, giving Vance the birth-name of James Donald Bowman.
Donald Bowman left the family when Vance was six.
Vance’s mother’s third husband, Bob Hamel, adopted Vance, giving him the name he carried with him to Yale. That relationship didn’t last either, leaving Vance estranged from the men from whom he’d inherited both of his surnames.
He wrote in Hillbilly Elegy about his decision, taken while attending Yale, to adopt the name “of the family to which I belonged.”
For certain voices in the transgender community, Vance’s decision not to identify with his birth name while opposing certain trans issues smacks of hypocrisy.
