Jay Alfie

A transgender teen set to graduate from Allen High School still won’t get to hear his correct name called out Friday night, June 1, as he walks across the stage to receive his diploma. But it appears that he at least won’t have to endure being publicly dead-named.

Although Jay Alfie had been told at the beginning of the school year that school officials had no problems using his correct name at graduation, when he checked again a couple of months ago, Jay was told that school officials would only use his legal name, which at this point is the female name he was given at birth.

But Tuesday morning, Jay’s parents met with the graduation coordinator and suggested that they either announce Jay using only his first initial and last name, or using his double last name, Alfie Andrade.

“He [the coordinator] told them he could probably work with that, but we won’t know for sure what name they will be using until sometime tomorrow [Wednesday, May 30],” Jay’s older sister, Isabella, said.

Jay Alfie began transitioning more than a year ago, according to his older sister Isabella Alfie, but had chosen to delay having his name changed legally. She said that after going through the required therapy, at the end of the last school year Jay had been given permission to go ahead with top surgery and testosterone therapy. At the start of this year, she added, he began the name-change process.

But, Isabella said, she and her brother and parents are still citizens of Mexico, which means that since he is now 18, Jay will have to go to Mexico himself to have his name and gender markers on his birth certificate changed.

Isabella said that since Jay was told school officials were insisting on dead-naming him at graduation, their parents had been talking to and meeting with numerous school officials to try and find a solution amenable to both sides. She also said that the school’s insistence on using Jay’s legal name only was odd, since when she was preparing to graduate from the same school not long ago, she was specifically asked how she would like her name announced.

“In Mexico, we have two last names — our father’s name and our mother’s name — and I asked them not to use both, to just use Alfie because here, you just go by your father’s last name. And they didn’t have a problem with that,” Isabella said. “And I know that when someone has a name that’s hard to pronounce, they will announce their nickname instead.

“So I guess they just have some problem especially with using Jay’s name.”

The meeting with the graduation coordinator happened only after Jay and his family went public with their story, which has been featured on several websites in the last few days. And when her parent spoke to him this morning, Isabella said, the coordinator was “really mad because we went to the media before we talked with him. But my parents had been trying to get a meeting with him, and he was never available before.”

In an interview before her parents met with the coordinator, Isabella predicted that anger. “Allen doesn’t like bad publicity,” she said. “They are going to be mad that we went to the media with the story.”

In an interview with CBS 11 DFW, Jay said, “Everybody knows me as Jay, and I don’t want to go to my last day of high school, my ceremony to be called down by the wrong thing. I’m not getting recognized for all the success that I’ve made, all the grades that I’ve made, and all these things that I’ve accomplished.”

Also in that interview, it was obvious that Jay’s family is supporting him in his transition and in his efforts to be properly named at his graduation.

“It makes me sad that they’re not going to allow him to enjoy that one last moment,” said his father, Jorge Alfie. “And what are we talking about here, 10 seconds? But it’s probably one of the 10 most important seconds of his life.”

And Isabella, who has started a petition at MoveOn.org calling on Allen ISD officials to use her brother’s correct name, told the TV news station, “Just to say his name — I don’t see why that’s a big deal” to school officials.

Isabella’s petition already has more than 5,000 signatures, but she is hoping to collect at least 10,000 total, she said Tuesday.

“We want them to pay attention,” she said of school officials.

You can find and sign the petition here.

— Tammye Nash