Pride flag flying at Apple’s old headquarters
Leading up to Pride, we looked at how Apple didn’t adequately explain if they were supporting LGBTQ organizations with the sales of their Pride Apple Watch Bands. They have a gay CEO, and seem to support the LGBTQ community, so it seemed strange that they couldn’t outright say they contributed a portion of the sales of the Pride Apple Watch Band to LGBTQ charities. In that article, I briefly mentioned an issue Apple has uniquely created for their transgender users. So I reached out to Apple to discover the full depths of the issue. Turns out, it’s true, Apple’s still making life more difficult for their transgender iCloud users, as they don’t allow users to change their primary email address without deleting every email. Google’s gmail and others operate the same way, but most of those accounts revolve around that email address. iCloud accounts are for far more.
This means transgender users—and anyone who changes their name—with an Apple ID have to choose between giving up all of their emails, or permanently having their old name stare them in the face. For most people, a changed name is either through marriage or the witness protection program. Or your weirdo parents named you after a prototype supersonic spy plane. Hopefully his iCloud account wasn’t already set up for him, because, if it was, changing it’s going to be a pain. For trans people though, an old name is a burden they don’t want to carry around for the rest of their lives. It’s a reminder of the life that was forced on them, not the live they chose to live.
Permanently Deadnaming
Deadnaming is the act of using a transgender person’s old name. Often, this isn’t even their legal name anymore. However, even in cases where it is, it’s still inappropriate to refer to people by a name they don’t like. Imagine if you told everyone your name was “Richard” but you go by “Rich” and someone refused to call you anything but “Dick.” I mean, technically they’re right, that’s a nickname for Richard, but they’re being kind of a huge Richard. It’s worse than that though, and I don’t want to minimize the transgender experience by comparing the two. For transgender people, that old name is a source of shame, pain, and suffering. It can lead transgender people to feel extreme and acute anxiety or depression at the mention of their old name.
That’s why it’s awful that Apple refuses to stop.
An Apple ID primary email address can easily be changed. However, a user cannot remove the original email address for their account without completely deleting it. It’s a lengthy process, and at the end, they lose all of their emails. Apple won’t save them.
This means that, unless a trans person is okay losing their emails, one of their old email addresses, possibly with a name that causes them shame and discomfort, will always be around. For many transgender people, this is unacceptable.
How to “Change” Old Email Addresses
Since Apple won’t let anyone change their primary account email address, everyone’s stuck with deleting it and making a new one. This will just be the primary email address and inbox, not any other iCloud data. If you want to do this, you’ll have to call up Apple and explain the issue and what you wanted deleted. Not the account, just the email. They’ll delete your old email address and everything that’s on it. You can forward important emails to another address, or be sure to download them onto your computer and take the account offline. Then, back up your old emails to an external drive. Once Apple deletes everything, it’s gone. They don’t maintain backups, and Time Machine won’t back up the old account either.
After they’re done deleting, you’ll have to make a new iCloud email address. Interestingly, Apple has no way of doing this outside of logging in to a device with an iCloud account. On one of your iCloud devices, macOS or iOS, log out. Then log back in. When you do, Apple will notice that you don’t have an email address for your iCloud and prompt you to create one, treating you like a new user. Then it should download all your iCloud information. It’ll eventually be like you never logged out, but the old emails will be gone forever.
Apple didn’t even think this was something users may do on their own. They didn’t even think that someone might change their name. Seeing as women often change their last name when they get married, it shows just how little Apple thinks about women or transgender people at the company. But it’s tech, what else is new?
An Alternative
As an alternative, you can create email aliases. Apple lets users set up three of these aliases. So, if you’re trans, got married, or just want a more professional-sounding email address to use for résumés other than whatever you used to sign up for iTunes back in 2008 when you thought you’d be a “scenegrrrrl4lyfe,” you can create an alias right in iCloud. It’s also a good idea to use these for buying items online. That way you can delete or change the alias to cut all of those companies you shop with off. Do that every few years, and you’ll have very little spam.
To create an email alias, go to iCloud.com. Click on Mail. In the lower left corner, click the gear icon for settings. Then click Accounts. Here, on the left side, you can create an alias by clicking “Add an alias….” It’s really that easy. Add up to three email addresses. These can be the addresses you give out to people. You can send email from them and receive email via them. As long as you never give out the real email, and don’t accidentally send anything from it, no one will know it’s an alias.
But you will. If you go to, say, log in to your iCloud account from another device, you’ll have to use the original email address, not the alias. You’ll also have to specify to send and receive emails from the alias, if the client you use even allows this. You’ll also have to be sure to turn off any contact info for those email addresses, so you won’t accidentally send or receive email on them. This is a lot of hoops to jump through just to use a different name than you had when you signed up for iCloud. For trans people, it’s more than an annoyance, it’s depressing and traumatic.
This isn’t Right…
We can do better than this for trans people. They’re emails. A few bites in size. I’m an email hoarder and I’ve had my primary email addresses for years. I’m using less than 6GB, and that includes attachments. That would take minutes to transfer to a new email address on the same iCloud account. There’s really no technical reason or excuse for this. Apple just hasn’t put in the effort to do it because, frankly, creating an alias is nothing more than a minor annoyance for most people. If a married woman accidentally send something from her original address, she can easily just say, “Oops, that’s my old email, use this one.” She’ll face no judgement for changing her name. Not like a trans person could. Therefore, this is only really a problem for transgender people. And that’s the issue. Trans people just aren’t worth Apple’s time.
At least in Apple’s opinion, it would seem.
All negativity aside, I want to give a huge shout-out to Apple support, for telling me how this is done.