This year PLU has launched the Names are Sacred campaign. The goal of this is to “foster empathy and understanding around the importance of using chosen names, promote an inclusive environment where everyone’s name is valued and acknowledged, and encourage community members to reflect on their own name journeys and the significance of names in their lives,” according to the DJS email sent out at the beginning of the semester. This is an important and progressive campaign for PLU as many students do not use or identify with birth names.
However, PLU may not be as committed to this campaign as it would seem. On September 13th a fire drill was conducted in Harstad Hall, now upper-division housing. The resident assistants were given a list of names to check off once all students were convened in Red Square. On that list were some students’ dead names and not their chosen, sacred names.
Ashton Allen, a student living in Harstad, had his deadname called out publicly during the fire drill. He said about the incident, “It made me think, which names are they considering sacred? Is it my dead name, or my chosen name?… It is also a safety risk having people know my dead name…People who were there [at the fire drill] know where I live.”
PLU has a history of deadnaming students, especially on class rosters. When asked about being deadnamed in class Ashton said “I have been deadnamed this year the most in class.” Ashton has not gone by his deadname at any point during his time at PLU.
A resident assistant at the event, Amanda Botts, shared her point of view. “I was one of the people reading the names out loud. There were only a handful of people whose preferred names were put in parentheses on the rosters, so we read those preferred names out loud, but there were people whose preferred names were not notated at all… So I had no clue what I was reading.”
It seems that some chosen names were indicated, but not all. How can these chosen names be sacred if they can’t even make it onto a fire drill roster? How can they be sacred if they are indicated in parentheses? The answer is they aren’t, or at least not to PLU. A final message from Ashton to PLU administrators, “Stop performing. If you’re going to say names are sacred, actually treat them as sacred.”
