Luca Brenna scoured baby books for months looking for the right name. Jennifer, Sandra, Vanessa. None of them fit.
But with a few strokes of mascara and some dabs of blush, the choice of name became obvious. In the mirror, he saw a woman with flawless skin, blond hair, deep blue eyes and thin red lips.
Brenna knew it was time to change his name and sex on his driver's license. So on Dec. 26, 2002, at age 31, he became Sonya.
"It was hard to decide," the 33-year-old said. "How does a name match a person? It's just something about that name that's very connected to who you are.
To many transgender people -- those men and women who, gay or straight, identify with the opposite sex -- changing their name and gender on official records is as important to their identity change as surgery or hormone therapy, advocates say.
Since Brenna was a teenager, he knew he was not supposed to be a boy. The name change was a crucial part of a long journey to become what he felt he was meant to be: a woman.
"It meant the world to me," Brenna said of the license with her new name. "I'm somebody. I see myself in that printed ID and it's just the world."
But without an official name change, transgender people cannot use the new name on leases, credit cards, insurance records or college transcripts.
And the steps required to change the basic documents -- Social Security cards, driver's licenses and passports -- can be confusing and sometimes unfair, advocates said.
The increasing concerns of identity theft have made name-change processes for transgender people even more difficult to undertake, attorneys said.
"Identity theft is a very real and growing problem," said Michael Hernandez, an attorney who helps transgender people with their name changes. "I don't think anybody really gave much thought about how it impacted the transgender community."
Usually, the process of changing one's name is relatively easy and in most cases it requires just a marriage license or divorce decree. For transgender people, the process -- which varies from agency to agency -- is more complicated because they must change both their name and their sex.
Advocates say the policies are insensitive because they don't "correspond to the everyday experiences of transgender people."
