Funnily enough, in California – usually considered a fairly relaxed and accommodating place –, the law stipulates that people’s names must consist exclusively of “the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language with appropriate punctuation if necessary”. Too bad if you’re José Nuñez or, for that matter, X Æ A-12 Musk (or whatever).
The apparent workaround is that your parents get to fill in your birth certificate temporarily with “-” as the first, middle, and last name – on the understanding that they will eventually come back with your actual name that does fit the rules. This seems to be what Elon and Grimes have done, so the kid affectionately known to the world as X Æ A-12 is, as far as the Golden State is concerned, called Dash Dash Dash until further notice.
This lack of a proper legal name will really only matter once X Æ A-12 wants or needs a passport, driver’s license, or Social Security number, which given his background may or may not be a pressing issue. True, a passport might conceivably come in useful at some point – but OTOH Elon Musk has South African/Canadian/US citizenship, and Grimes is Canadian, so perhaps something can be arranged if one of these places is more tolerant about funny characters in names than California.
All the Prince stories I’ve heard of the variety of “I met him briefly somewhere” involve harmless weirdness, sometimes not speaking at all, and then leaving waitstaff monster tips. Seems like he was a good egg.
Techno Mechanicus was born via surrogate in June 2022. His nickname, Tau, is a reference to the Greek letter that represents two times the value of pi, an irrational number important in geometry and mathematics.
Or the name is just an incredibly dumb Warhammer 40,000 reference. Which, knowing Musk as much as we do, seems incredibly likely.
Redacted for continuity: have a feeling mostly no one thinks that. Like literally no one posting here is likely the kind of hardcore misogynist you would have to be to take that position or that much of a hardcore libertarian either and I’m not sure that isn’t a circle on a venn diagram anyway.
The issue here as I see it in this thread for this subject is that the legal question is going to be about visitation rights and motherhood. And the rights of women around surrogacy will be a key factor. If I had to guess the whole thing is part of what is going to be a legal case that will help remove parental rights from pregnant people and mothers to enable further exploitation of women as a whole and I believe Grimes is complicit in it whether she is a victim herself or not.
Just speaking for myself personally and no one else here, that is my ugly take on these strangers I wish I never heard of and their family drama. Whether they are doing it knowingly or just paving the way because they are famous I’m not even sure it matters. Assholes are going to asshole.
To be fair, there were always stories about him being kind of a dick at times… like the one Sinead O’Connor talked about in her book… So… There has also been other stories about him and some of the women he worked with that sound… not so great?
It’s like a certain contingent here is trying to imply that Grimes somehow has less rights to her own kids just because she didn’t pop all of them out of her own womb… and that’s incredibly fucked up.
No matter who she is or who she’s associated with.
Yes, there is a serious conversation to be had about surrogacy, exploitation and surrogate’s rights, but that’s another topic for another thread, rather than some folks trying to derail this one.
Weird how often that seems to happen whenever the topic is about women and issues related to our rights and agency…
Yeah. The reason the letter exists in Unicode is that it is in active use (although the ae ligature was much more common in the Middle Ages and I can’t think of a European language where it wasn’t used in medieval writing). Icelandic, Norwegian and Danish come immediately to mind, although I’m sure there’s others.
I’m sure people like Ævar Þór Benediktsson or Knut Sæborg are able to fill in forms. It’s possible they will have to substitute letters abroad, but literally everyone who isn’t a native English speaker is used to that, if not on their name then in their address or other things they need to enter into forms.
Anthony Philip David Terry Frank Donald Stanley Gerry Gordon Stephen James is his first name. It was the Queens Park Rangers starting eleven the week he was born.
It can still suck, e.g., when dealing with commercial air travel. The character set allowed for names on tickets and boarding cards is very limited, and this can become a major hassle if you try to use an automated check-in kiosk and there is a mismatch between the machine-readable data on your passport and how the airline thinks your name is spelled. For example, my SO has a hyphen between two of her given names in her passport, and of course airlines don’t believe hyphens in people’s names are a thing, so it’s off to the staffed check-in counter for her just to pick up a boarding card.
There has also been other stories about him and some of the women he worked with that sound… not so great?
