In Illinois, Trans People With Criminal Records Still Face Hurdles to Changing Their Names

Illinois earlier this year removed obstacles that some trans residents face when changing their name, with legislators lifting more of the restrictions faced by people with criminal convictions. 

The state had long forced people to wait a decade after completing a felony sentence to even be eligible to petition for a name change, and once it was granted, it required that they have the change published in a newspaper. Advocates rallied against the rules for imposing excessive burdens on trans residents, and won a pair of legislative reforms, first in February of 2023, and then again early this year.

But even with these reforms, advocates in Illinois say state law still creates barriers to living authentically for trans people with involvement in the criminal legal system—and that Black and brown trans women, who have historically been overcriminalized, still bear the brunt of this disparity. 

“I think what gets lost is that trans people, particularly trans women of color, are more impacted by the criminal legal system,” said Avi Rudnick, director of legal services at the Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois, which hosts frequent name change workshops for trans and nonbinary people. “They’re more targeted by the police. They often live in communities that have more police and so are disproportionately represented in the criminal legal system.”

Under current law, Illinois prosecutors may still file objections to people seeking name changes who have any previous convictions, from felonies to even low-level misdemeanors, or for those with any arrest or charge on their record that hasn’t yet been resolved. 

Eisha Love, a Chicago activist and trans woman who had pushed to change the law around name changes in Illinois, says trans people shouldn’t be at the mercy of a prosecutor’s decision, and that the prospect of objections by law enforcement could keep some from even trying to go through the process.

“It would kind of ruin my spirit,” she said. 

Love, who finished the terms of her sentence for aggravated battery at the end of 2015, had to wait until 2024 to change her name, after Illinois lawmakers ended the decade-long waiting period for people with felony convictions. And while the state didn’t object outright to her petition, the motion prosecutors filed to require that Love update her criminal history transcript with state law enforcement is headlined as a request to update “his” transcript. 

Love has maintained that the man she was accused of fighting with at a gas station in 2012, and ultimately hitting with her car, had verbally and physically assaulted her because she’s trans, and that she was defending herself and attempting to flee. She spent nearly four years in a men’s prison, despite the fact that she is a woman, repeatedly in solitary confinement—her case a stark example of the many problems trans people face in the criminal legal system. 

Rudnick said they’ve had clients forgo the name change process after struggling with the bureaucratic hurdles. For instance, they said that prosecutors often also ask the court to require people to begin the process to update their criminal history transcripts before a judge decides whether to grant the name change petition—which involves getting fingerprinted, which is typically the least expensive when done at a police station. 

“I watch how activating it is for people that they’re being put under this level of scrutiny when all they’re trying to do is, you know, be affirmed in their identity,” they told Bolts. 

This summer, at a budget meeting for Cook County—home to Chicago and nearly half of Illinois’ population—Commissioner Maggie Trevor raised questions about why and how prosecutors get to file objections.

“It is having an impact on transgender people who are trying to change their names,” Trevor said during the meeting. “It’s a population that tends to have higher than average rates of having criminal convictions in their past, and when those objections are filed, the people who are trying to change their names face additional bureaucratic and financial hurdles to essentially achieve that.” 

In an interview with Bolts, Trevor said she’s just one of several openly LGBTQ+ public officials who has brought concerns about the name change process to the state’s attorney’s office this year. Trevor questioned whether the process is even necessary or has any public safety benefit, as prosecutors have argued.  

“It seems to me, in this modern day and age, especially since we’re having people fill out forms with their previous names and their new names, and we are keeping track of this—that it’s not like, suddenly people can completely go incognito when they change their name,” Trevor said. 

The 2023 law that removed Illinois’ decade-long waiting period for people with felony sentences also allowed people convicted of identity theft, certain sex offenses and other violent crimes—who all previously faced a strict lifetime ban—to now file a petition with a judge if they attest that the name change is due to marriage, religion, status as a human trafficking survivor, or “gender-related identity.” 

The law that Illinois passed this year, which was championed by trans rights groups as well as survivors of domestic violence, repealed the requirement for name changes to be published in a local newspaper. It also established a process for people to petition to “impound” court records of their name change, which keeps them from being publicly accessible, if a judge agrees that public disclosure “would be a hardship and have a negative impact on the person’s health or safety” due to a number of reasons—inluding someone whether someone is transgender, an abuse survivor, or because of immigration status.

Republican legislators in the state who opposed the change argued that the reforms allowed for “whitewashing of criminal backgrounds” and could allow people to “abuse the system and manipulate the process and evade the federal immigration authorities.”

AC Dumlao, a legal helpdesk manager at the Transgender Law Center, said concerns that name changes can allow people to hide dangerous criminal pasts are unfounded, and that a myriad of public records and digital footprints make it difficult if not impossible to dodge former names or identities. Dumlao previously managed the Name Change Project, which provides low income gender expansive people with free legal name change services, at Advocates for Trans Equality.

“There is no more record-keeping argument, in my mind,” Dumlao said. “You can update the records.” 

Advocates say that restrictions on name changes can end up forcing trans people to continue using their deadnames, which may lead to further discrimination and even put their lives at risk, given the rise in anti-trans violence across North America. According to GLAAD, between May 2024 and May 2025, the media advocacy organization’s anti-LGBTQ+ extremism reporting tracker tallied more than 900 incidents across the nation, amounting to 2.5 incidents every day—more than half of which specifically targeted transgender or gender nonconforming people. 

Advocates including Rudnick and Dumlao point out that restrictions for people with criminal histories almost always disproportionately impact trans people; according to a 2022 study by LGBTQ+ legal advocacy groups Black & Pink and Lambda Legal, nearly a third of queer people surveyed had been in some form of incarceration at some point in the last five years.

Discrimination and harassment can also force trans people into what’s known as the underground economy; a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans people reported that one in five had resorted to sex work, selling drugs or other illicit activities for income in their lives. And prostitution arrests targeting trans people, often for simply existing in the world, also highlight the ways trans people are highly criminalized in the U.S. 

Beyond forced outing and safety risks that name change restrictions can pose, Dumlao and others say these policies broadly operate under the assumption that trans people living with criminal histories are inherently trying to be deceitful in changing their names.

“It’s just so offensive and deeply untrue … this idea that ‘we can’t let this person change their name if they have a criminal record,’” they said. “People should be able to change their name unless it’s for a criminal reason, and trans people aren’t doing anything criminal by wanting to change their names.” 

When Trevor raised the issue with prosecutors at the Cook County budget hearing in July, Yvette Loizon, the chief of policy at the state’s attorney’s office, said the office had no formal policy on paper regarding name changes for trans people, and that the office was handling name changes the same as under former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who was replaced by Eileen O’Neill Burke late last year.  

“We’re trying very hard to balance two interests that don’t have to be competing but do have to be balanced,” Loizon said at the hearing. “And that interest is in ensuring that we can track if there’s serious felony conduct in a person’s background or conduct that may be misdemeanor conduct, but something like a domestic battery, where we are concerned about violence, we want to make sure we are securely tracking the change in name. However we also want to balance that to ensure that people who want to get a name change for entirely appropriate reasons are not being required to jump through a lot of obstacles and hoops.”

Records obtained by Bolts under a public information request show the state’s attorney’s office adopted a new policy around objecting to name changes after this summer’s budget hearing highlighted the issue. The three-page policy document, which became effective Sept. 18, 2025, contains no provisions related to name changes based on gender-identity, other than listing it among other categories in general provisions about prohibiting discrimination. The policy also calls for the office to request that criminal histories be reviewed in cases where people seeking a name change have any previous convictions for certain felonies, any convictions for misdemeanor DWI or domestic battery in the previous decade, or have any charges pending.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the office told Bolts that the policy “reflects our ongoing commitment to fairness, transparency, and respect for all residents of Cook County.”

Elizabeth Ricks, who runs a low- or no-cost legal services program for trans people at Chicago House, told Bolts that, in her experience, Cook County prosecutors have taken more interest in name change petitions for people with criminal records since state politicians first changed the law in 2023, saying that they’ve scrutinized the records of people convicted of turnstile jumping in another state or even decades-old marijuana-related offenses. 

“It’s very strange to me that this has now, in the last two years, become some sort of very important public safety precaution,” Ricks said.

In response to the request from Bolts, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office also provided records in 14 cases where prosecutors objected to name change petitions filed since September 2024—filed during the final months of former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and Eileen O’Neill Burke’s first months leading the office, all targeting people with recent arrests, pending criminal charges, or people convicted of certain sex offenses. The office told Bolts it does not track the number of name changes it objects to that were filed based on gender identity, but at least one of the petitions provided seek to change from a more masculine to a more feminine name. 

Advocates like Rudnick and Ricks say the barriers to name changes in Illinois are still unnecessary and punitive, and they hope that Illinois lawmakers continue to reform the process, and at the very least establish more limits on how the criminal legal system can stall it. 

“It’s not politically popular to reduce restrictions for people with convictions or who are in the criminal legal system, that’s just the reality of our culture at this time,” Rudnick said. “But if you are going to have these objections, there needs to be guardrails.”