How to best support transgender coming out?

[max_e]

Hi there!

We recently had a transgender person come out and want to support them in their taking affirmative action such as renaming their (google workspace) account, including new email and all that. Strangely, we did not find any help article or even discussions on the topic, besides some news articles and a blog post that did not go into detail on how to _actually_ help. Also, the issue was (understandably) kept secret by the people&culture (HR) team, so now the IT side of things has/had to go a bit rushed/awkwardly.
We ended up creating a new account with the new name of the employee. However now we have to solve a cascade of small issues propping up such as old email still being in the deadnamed account, the need to log in to all other sites where google login was used (with the deadname), and questions about what to do with email still going to the old account (because they use the deadnamed address). Probably more such issues will come up in the future.

We know how to transfer the old drive data and email to the new account. That solution seems a bit clumsy, though. So does anybody have experience with this, or knows a "best approach" to supporting the (online) transition of coworkers? Thanks in advance for your insights.

[Jan-Carlos]

Hello!

There was no need to create a new account, you should have just renamed it.

Here's the doc: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9820788?hl=en&ref_topic=14588

The old mail will be a alias for the new mail after rename it.

You can set an alias in the user information on admin console: https://support.google.com/a/answer/33327?hl=en

And you can change the directory name too:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/182084?hl=en&ref_topic=14588

[max_e]

Hi Jan-Carlos

Thanks! Our thought process was that the old identity should be as far removed from the new one as possible. But I see how we probably made our life harder with this.

Do you know what happens if that renamed account is used to log into other SaaS applications such as Notion when using the google social/SSO login?

[Jan-Carlos]

That's a good question!

I don't know if the data is synced with you directory or it only reads on the first access.

[tadixon]

In my experience (admin of same GWP domains since 2008), when you rename an account, the SaaS applications that the account was used to authenticate to using Google credentials continue to authenticate them (Adobe Sign, Zoom, etc.). Whether or not each SaaS application picks up the renaming action is not something I am sure of.

One thing to be aware of with a rename action - the deadname will not be removed from the Contact list of each user in your domain. Each individual user that contacted the user who was renamed will need to correct their own Contact list by either deleting it or renaming it themselves.

If they choose to delete the outdated contact, the next time they address an email or calendar invite, the client will pickup the renamed contact from the GWP Directory, where the name was updated.

For more on the Contacts issue after a rename event, see this request for Google to fix it (please upvote!):  https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/Feature-Ideas/Name-Change-Propagation/idi-p/163881