What I Call Myself: The Great Battle of the Label, Someone Else's Tongue, and the Database

"What's in a name?"

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2, Juliet's speech (Project Gutenberg #100).

What This Fuss Is All About

An office example invented by the authors: a woman reverts to her premarital surname after a divorce, yet a year later her colleagues are still calling her by the old one. In your own head, you are already a radiant phoenix with a freshly minted profile; in everyone else's memory, you remain the exact same row in an outdated Excel spreadsheet. Updating legal records and official paperwork is an entirely separate matter.

Three fundamentally different things are tangled together here:

The name handed to you at birth (nobody bothered to consult you).
The label bestowed upon you by onlookers, coworkers, and archive folders (other people's speech and bureaucracy).
The self-designation—who and what you proclaim yourself to be.

We dissect this comedy of errors through Confucius and Epictetus (for whom a name is not a badge of vanity, but a yoke of duty), Old Testament bureaucracy (where even a divine system update does not instantly refresh the narrator's database), Juliet's balcony protest and the ancient Greek debater Hermogenes, a Taoist shrug of the shoulders, and modern empirical measurements of linguistic habits. A candid spoiler up front: none of the scientific papers reviewed here actually measured whether changing your sign makes a person feel any warmer or happier inside. Consequently, the closing takeaways represent a practical argument by the authors, not a clinical panacea.

I. Three Words About Oneself: Why Someone Else's Tongue Won't Obey You

In an ideal universe, your inner self-concept, your passport, and the shout of your neighbor would align in harmony. In reality, they inhabit parallel dimensions.

The first word is your given name. It was settled by relatives or legal statutes back when your sole skills were wailing and soiling diapers. The second is external address: nicknames, employment contracts, water-cooler gossip, and system audit logs. The third is your personal self-designation: how you introduce yourself out loud, how you sign your emails, and who you conceive yourself to be. As long as you drift with the current, no friction arises. But the moment you decree, "Starting Monday, I am no longer Tony, but Antoine," the gears grind to a halt.

Here lies the boundary of control. Swapping a term inside your own skull takes a split second, requiring neither rubber stamps nor notary seals. Compelling the living human being across from you, an exhausted bank teller, or an automated legacy mailing script to articulate that new word is an entirely different enterprise. Other people's speech and ingrained habits do not belong to you. The prerogative to change is the liberty to designate oneself otherwise and a reasonable claim for recognition: one may ask, explain, and insist. But it is not a remote control for other people's vocal cords: one must distinguish between one's own declaration and the actual response of the surrounding world.

II. A Name Obligates: Confucius, Epictetus, and the Maintenance Bill

If you entertained the notion that adopting a grand new moniker makes life smoother, ancient philosophers are eager to disillusion you. In the ancient sources under review, the title of a role is intrinsically bound to obligation. A rigid employment contract is our modern analogy, not an antique manual for updating an avatar.

In Book XIII of the Analects (XIII.3), Zilu asks Confucius where he would begin if tasked with administering the government of Wei. Confucius delivers an uncompromising verdict: "What is necessary is to rectify names." The disciple winces, dismissing it as pedantic hairsplitting, but the sage clarifies: when words do not correspond to the reality of affairs, deeds fall apart, laws lose their bearings, and ordinary citizens are left not knowing where to put hand or foot. Granted, Confucius was fretting over state machinery and official court ranks, rather than rebranding handles on social media. Yet the underlying logic is ironclad: if you call yourself a leader, you must govern rather than put on an act.

The Stoic Epictetus, in his Discourses (II.10, translated by George Long), brings that very standard down from the throne onto ordinary ground: He asks the listener to consider who they are, beginning with their being human. And subsequently—a citizen, a son, a brother, a senator. Each placard slung around your neck, according to Epictetus, comes with an itemized ledger of obligations. In Epictetus's ancient framework, brotherhood likewise entails moral duties. This is not a modern mandate to endure mistreatment from toxic relatives.

Neither Confucius nor Epictetus ever debated altering a civil registry for the sake of emotional comfort. Our modern application is simply an interpretive reading: whenever you brandish a new role, you had better figure out which societal expectations you are genuinely signing up for and which you intend to shrug off. Coining a fresh handle does not automatically sign a new contract on your behalf, nor does it magically wipe away your pre-existing real-world commitments.

III. A Name Bestowed from On High: Even in the Biblical Narrative, the Old Name Persists

In the Book of Genesis, brand-new names are handed down at the highest administrative tier—by the Creator Himself, sealing an epochal covenant. Abram becomes Abraham with an eye toward fathering a multitude of nations (Gen. 17:5), while Jacob, following an all-night wrestling match, receives the name Israel as a monument to his struggle (Gen. 32:28). The decree seems sealed, the directive issued straight from the top.

Yet observe the dark comedy of how narrative paperwork unfolds: the old name refuses to vanish! In the very next chapter, the narrator blithely reverts to calling the protagonist Jacob (Gen. 33:1). In Genesis 35:10, the renaming is reiterated all over again. The text leaves the reason unstated; the new form seems to have acquired the full bureaucratic adventure package—a splendid official stamp, while the relevant line still resides at its old address.

Naturally, you will not extract a neat self-help recipe or a five-minute shortcut to personal discovery from this sacred narrative. It remains a venerable religious tale rather than a notarised historical transcript or an empirical benchmark for how fast a society can update its vocabulary. The enduring literary friction between the announced title and subsequent everyday naming is delightfully revealing on its own, though it hardly grants your stubborn aunt moral license to wave away a courteous personal request.

IV. Bitter Naomi and the Deaf Bethlehem Narrative

The Book of Ruth stages a textbook precedent: an individual, without benefit of thunder from the heavens, demands a change of name purely on the grounds of personal catastrophe.

Having lost her husband and sons in foreign territory, Naomi returns to her hometown as a widow. The women of the town recognize Naomi, but she entreats them to call her Mara instead: her former name carried connotations of pleasantness, whereas the new one denotes bitterness (Ruth 1:20–21). Concerning her life, she remarks that she went out full and came back empty; this is her own existential reckoning with bereavement, not an audited balance sheet. An individual states plainly: the prosperous label of the past has collapsed; reality is hollow and bitter.

One might imagine the manifesto was officially logged. Yet in the very next verse, the narrator reverts to using the name Naomi (Ruth 1:22). In the finale, the neighboring women associate the newly born infant with Naomi (Ruth 4:17), even though it is her daughter-in-law Ruth who gives birth: this is not a claim of biological motherhood on Naomi's part.

The chronicler's rationale remains unexplained: perhaps "Mara" was viewed merely as an agonizing cry of despair, or perhaps to the locals she remained the familiar Naomi of old. Nevertheless, the moral of this drama is crystal clear: you have every right to issue the most poignant declaration to the world, yet it remains a human appeal. The world possesses a colossal gravitational pull of habit, and the narrator's quiet retention of an old name is certainly no universal license to shrug off someone else's pain.

V. The Skeptics' Objection: The Rose Still Smells, and Slaves Are Renamed by Masters

Predictably, a sensible counterargument presents itself: a word is an empty wrapper, mere agitated air.

Juliet on her balcony (Romeo and Juliet, II.2) eloquently proclaims that a rose remains a rose no matter what you call it, and that Romeo would retain his perfection even stripped of the ancestral Montague curse. The lovesick youth is only too thrilled to renounce his name for a kiss. In Plato's dialogue Cratylus (384c–d), Hermogenes chimes in: names are pure convention and social pact. Swap the handle of an enslaved person, and the newly applied tag is not a whit worse than the old one.

However, treating a name as a totally arbitrary social whim is strictly Hermogenes' gambit, not an established doctrine of Socrates or Plato: at the dialogue's outset, Socrates merely peppers the claim with probing queries rather than rubber-stamping it or definitively resolving the debate. Moreover, Hermogenes' ancient quip about masters arbitrarily renaming enslaved laborers reflects an era of absolute domination rather than modern best practice, reminding us that whenever folks debate "loose conventions," it always pays to ask who is really calling the shots at the bargaining table.

Moreover, the fate of the play's protagonists complicates Juliet's poetic reasoning—spoken by a dramatic character, not Shakespeare's press secretary. Star-crossed lovers may insist until blue in the face that family names are meaningless clusters of letters, but the tribal brandings of Montague and Capulet ultimately march them straight into the family crypt. Swapping a label does not alter underlying physical substance, but how society treats that label has the power to shatter a human life.

VI. A Name Is Smaller Than the One Who Bears It: A Taoist Smirk

Taoist thought provides an alternate escape hatch from the tyranny of labels: a name is suspect not because it is a phantom, but because reality simply refuses to be stuffed inside it.

The opening chapter of the Tao Te Ching proclaims: an enduring, constant name cannot be named. Strictly speaking, Laozi was contemplating the architecture of the cosmos and the primal genesis of heaven and earth, rather than how to sign a visitor's badge at the front desk. Transposing this cosmic formula onto the individual human self is strictly our own authorial analogy. But it hits the mark: a living human being is infinitely wider than any questionnaire.

In the Zhuangzi (Chap. I, translated by Herbert A. Giles), the hermit Xu You responds with amused mockery when Emperor Yao offers him the imperial throne: reputation and a good name are merely the shadow of reality, so why go chasing shadows? Again, this is the quip of a literary hermit-figure rather than a dogmatic manifesto, and trying to stitch Taoists and Confucians into a monolithic philosophical engine would be a stretch.

Nevertheless, there is immense relief in this insight: neither your old nor your new name will ever exhaustively capture your personhood. You may shuffle the letters or leave them untouched, but it is foolish to demand that a fleeting sequence of syllables encompass the full, untidy complexity of your soul.

VII. When Others Do the Naming: Community Bans and Cold Laboratory Data

A label slung from the outside hits hard. In Surah 49 of the Quran (The Apartments, verse 11, translated by J. M. Rodwell), there is an explicit command addressed to believers: do not defame one another, nor call each other by offensive nicknames. This is a rigorous internal ethic of communal solidarity acknowledging a simple truth: external language has the power to demean.

What does rigorous empirical science have to say once the matter is pulled out of religion and placed into a controlled experiment? Sandy Schumann and Hazem Zohny published a preregistered study in PLOS ONE in 2025. British respondents evaluated two target groups: individuals described as having committed a violent crime, and individuals with a physical disability. Two linguistic formulations were tested:

Identity-first ("violent criminals", "the physically disabled");
Person-first ("people who have committed a violent crime", "people with a physical disability").

A total of 681 participants completed both the preliminary and main phases. The analysis excluded 95 respondents who failed the language memory check, alongside other predetermined exclusions. The final sample following all filtering protocols comprised 522 individuals. Passing a memory check does not prove that a participant "thoroughly digested" the framing.

The findings proved remarkably sobering. For the group described as having committed a violent crime, person-first framing produced slight to moderate shifts across specific measures: negative stereotypes and negative feelings decreased, while reported contact intentions rose (though positive stereotypes and dehumanization scores showed no statistically significant changes).

Yet with individuals with physical disabilities, noble grammar hit a wall: no significant shifts were detected in negative stereotypes, negative feelings, or contact intentions; positive stereotypes actually experienced a modest dip, and dehumanization scores paradoxically registered higher. The authors hypothesize that a ceiling effect may have been at play (attitudes toward people with disabilities were already exceptionally warm across the sample), or perhaps the ostentatiously politically correct phrasing functioned as an inadvertent warning signal of latent stigma.

The primary methodological limitation: the study evaluated solely the third-party perceptions of well-educated British observers. How the people inside these cohorts actually feel and navigate life under such phrasing was not investigated by the authors.

VIII. Linguistic Fashion: Drifting Norms and the Illusion of Eternal Correctness

Words are not carved into bedrock—they drift alongside cultural fashion. Kang, Baes, Wu, and Haslam published an extensive corpus study across 15 health conditions (11 touching upon mental health and neurodevelopment) in PLOS Mental Health in 2026.

They analyzed English-language text corpora: Google Books (1980–2019) and the NOW news corpus (2010–2025). Across four decades of printed books, identity-first terminology ceded substantial ground: in plural forms, it plummeted from roughly 0.62 down to 0.32; in singular forms, from 0.81 down to 0.51. By the late 2010s, however, this downward momentum leveled off, while news feeds between 2010 and 2025 revealed zero overarching trend toward polite convergence.

The landscape fractured into divergent trajectories across conditions: in news coverage, identity-first descriptors grew more frequent for autism, dyslexia, and alcoholism, while continuing their decline for depression, obesity, and anorexia. Activism and editorial style guides are discussed by the authors as plausible drivers of these patterns. A corpus count does not demonstrate that society marched in lockstep behind a master plan and subsequently pivoted to another.

The authors conscientiously note: lexical frequency in media may hinge on editorial policies without capturing private personal preferences, and explanations for differences between diagnoses remain post hoc interpretations. The takeaway: the available data yield no single, universally "correct" linguistic blueprint. Adopting a label today simply purchases a ticket to the current round of an unending linguistic scrimmage.

IX. Law and the Archive: Where Romance Collides with Manilla Folders

Self-designation inevitably collides with the stone embankments of statutory law and archival databases, where your personal poetic sensibilities do nothing to alter the protocol for logging an entry.

An illuminating case in point is Turkish marital law, as outlined in a 2021 study. Under Article 187 of the 1926 Civil Code (in the historical configuration examined by the researchers at the time of their fieldwork), a woman was legally obliged to assume her husband's surname. Starting in 1997, legislation permitted retaining one's maiden name before the husband's name, whereas securing the right to retain one's birth surname exclusively required taking the matter to court.

Mariia Chayinska and colleagues (Frontiers in Psychology, 2021) conducted three cross-sectional surveys: 118 Turkish feminists, 131 female university students in Ankara, and 140 female university students in the United States. The data demonstrated that levels of hostile sexism statistically correlate with the endorsement of marital surname change for women. Furthermore, across the first and third cohorts, this relationship was statistically mediated by a tendency toward system justification regarding gender arrangements, whereas the second cohort displayed no such mediational pathway.

The researchers rightly underscore that a cross-sectional survey cannot establish causality, and it certainly does not diagnose any individual woman who chooses to take her spouse's name out of affection, practical convenience, or a wish to symbolize family unity.

A second theater of bureaucratic misery lies in scholarly publishing. Leo Chan Gaskins and Craig McClain, in a Perspective piece (PLOS Biology, 2021), detailed the existential bind faced by transgender researchers. Following a name change, a scholar confronts a grim dilemma: abandon earlier publications and forfeit hard-earned citations, drag the specter of a deadname indefinitely, or endure the indignity of petitioning dozens of editorial boards to update past records. The authors propose a centralized mechanism for "invisible" name updates via ORCID profiles without legal red tape, pointing out that such an infrastructure would equally benefit individuals changing surnames after marriage or divorce, as well as persons fleeing domestic violence. To be clear: this paper represents a reasoned opinion column and policy proposal, not an implemented institutional standard or an empirical dataset.

X. Limits of the Findings: Science Shrugs

Not one of the analyzed investigations—neither the British experiment (Schumann & Zohny), nor the text corpora (Kang et al.), nor the marital surname surveys (Chayinska et al.), nor the ORCID commentary (Gaskins & McClain)—focused on the direct subjective well-being of the renamed individual.

Does a new name enhance sleep quality, improve digestion, or elevate overall happiness? Or does it merely introduce an avalanche of paperwork and endless hushed chatter behind your back? In the literature examined here, direct empirical evidence on this point is absent.

The lay of the land is quite unromantic:

You are entirely free to proclaim any word regarding yourself.
That proclaimed word functions as a request directed toward those around you, not an imperial decree.
Others may persist in using your former form of address; ingrained habit, simple error, and deliberate defiance are distinct phenomena. A single utterance does not decode someone else's inner motives.
Modifying institutional records remains subject to the prevailing procedural rules of a given agency and jurisdiction.
Role titles are tied to moral duties in the reviewed passages of Confucius and Epictetus, yet a human being remains vastly larger than any administrative label (Laozi and Zhuangzi).

Shakespeare's insight is unsparing: words do not rearrange material reality at the snap of a finger. How others address you is shaped by their actual response. Nevertheless, the significance of your own personal choice is not reducible to their compliance; the reviewed research simply did not measure the extent to which that choice transforms how you feel inside.

Practical Guidelines Without Illusions

These represent the authors' working heuristics derived from analyzing the texts. They do not constitute a clinical methodology, a therapeutic treatment manual, or a guarantee of unalloyed bliss.

Sort your conceptual deck. Draw clean boundaries: your passport entry, your professional job title, your casual family nickname, and your existential self are four distinct buckets. Calling yourself a poet in a private notebook requires no municipal permit. Correcting an entry in a government register requires discovering the active legal protocol: private notebooks do not issue certified affidavits for archives.
Anchor the term to your biography, if only for yourself. Naomi demanded to be called Mara not for cheap shock value, but as a clear-eyed accounting of devastation. You are under no obligation to justify your motives to every passing stranger, yet it can be useful to ask yourself whether a chosen word reflects an enduring commitment or a passing emotional state. This is an exercise in self-clarity, not a litmus test of authenticity or a shield against regret.
Set the ground rules and do not expect miracles by morning. The persistence of an old name in a biblical narrative does not prove administrative chaos, nor does it prescribe an official timetable for your patience. In everyday life, you may need to restate your preference and observe the genuine reaction of a parent or an accountant. Distinguish between an involuntary slip born of twenty years of muscle memory, careless apathy, and overt malice. Reiterating your preference, having an explicit boundary conversation, or putting distance between you are situational options, not a mandatory three-step sequence.
Do not confuse an emotional impulse with record-keeping compliance. The institutional machine is fundamentally blind. Databases exist to preserve records. Investigate the current rules for record modifications in your specific jurisdiction and institution, check what documentation and possible fees are required, and take a sober look at how many hours of your life you are prepared to sacrifice to the bureaucratic leviathan.
When addressing others, abandon amateur telepathy. The Schumann and Zohny data reveal varied evaluations by third-party onlookers across cohorts, not the internal irritation of the individuals addressed. An uninvited nickname does not become respectful simply because you find it clever. If you are uncertain how someone prefers to be addressed, open your mouth and ask, rather than guessing based on decade-old reference manuals.
Relieve names of messianic burdens. A sequence of consonants and vowels should not be tasked with restoring lost youth, guaranteeing emotional healing, or paying off a mortgage. A new name can adjust how others address you, but the labor of plowing the soil of your own life will still fall squarely on your shoulders.

Boundaries of Help. If acute distress, persistent bullying, threats, or protracted family estrangement accompany questions surrounding your name, it is advisable to consult a licensed psychologist or physician. Questions concerning civil documentation and legal standing should be directed to a qualified attorney or the appropriate governing agency. If you are experiencing thoughts of self-harm, seek immediate professional assistance; in cases of acute danger, reach out to local emergency services. You do not need to perfect the philosophy of your personal name before asking for help.

Key Quote

"why then call ye me Naomi"

Book of Ruth 1:21 (short excerpt from the second half of the verse), King James Version: Project Gutenberg #10.

Compressed within this single question is the entire machinery of self-naming: the obsolete label, life experience incompatible with it, and a direct appeal to the people standing right in front of you. And the fact that the narrator, just a verse later, carries on using the old moniker serves as a blunt reminder: a person's words about themselves will always remain a hope for recognition, rather than an automatic triumph.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Comparison (Side A ↔ Side B)	Point of Convergence (Similarity)	Substantive Boundary
Confucius, Analects XIII.3 ↔ Epictetus, Discourses II.10	Role titles are tethered to duty: the demand to "rectify names" to prevent affairs from crumbling mirrors the Stoic injunction "Consider who you are" to comprehend personal obligations.	Confucius is engineering state governance and ministerial protocol; Epictetus is parsing personal ethics across social roles (brother, son, citizen). Neither gives a passing thought to voluntary legal name changes for personal comfort.
Genesis 17:5 and 32:28 ↔ Ruth 1:20–22 (KJV)	Renaming crystallizes a biographical turning point: a promise of the future, a memorial to struggle, or the unbearable bitterness of bereavement.	In Genesis, renaming stems from divine covenant or blessing; Naomi renames herself out of raw grief, yet the narrator immediately returns to her former name.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II.2 ↔ Plato, Cratylus, 384d, Hermogenes' speech	A name is treated as an external convention, a mere sound leaving the intrinsic nature of the thing untouched.	In the tragedy, this romantic fantasy shatters against the lethal power of clan labels; in the opening of the dialogue, Socrates critiques Hermogenes' claim, which must never be passed off as Plato's own doctrine.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chap. 1 ↔ Zhuangzi, Chap. I, Xu You's words	Skepticism toward labels: an utterable name is impermanent; social reputation is merely a hollow shadow cast by real entities.	Laozi is addressing cosmic Tao and the primal source of heaven and earth; Xu You is shunning political power in pursuit of unencumbered freedom. Neither is discussing civil paperwork or modern personal names.
Quran, Surah 49:11 ↔ Schumann & Zohny, 2025	External nomenclature carries potency: derogatory nicknames corrode community ties, while experimental grammar shifts third-party perceptions on rating scales.	A religious injunction governing a community of believers is fundamentally different from a laboratory study on British participants. In the trial, person-first language yielded modest shifts in certain ratings of people described as having committed a violent crime, but provided no advantage or worsened scores for people with disabilities.
Ruth 1:22; 4:17 (KJV) ↔ Gaskins & McClain, 2021	An announced new name may coexist with the old one in other people's speech and records.	The biblical narrative captures colloquial neighborly speech; the ORCID article is a policy opinion piece by scholars proposing database reforms without empirical datasets.

Primary Sources

The original article draws on the listed passages of traditional texts in the named translations and the full texts of four contemporary open-access publications accessed through Europe PMC. This adaptation retains that source base. The comparisons are the authors' own; resemblance does not establish shared doctrine or historical influence. The account of Turkish law comes from the 2021 paper and does not verify present-day law. The ORCID article is an opinion and proposal without its own empirical data.

The Chinese Classics, vol. 1: Confucian Analects, trans. James Legge (Project Gutenberg #4094). Book XIII, Chap. 3: Confucius on the rectification of names for order in state affairs and laws.
The Holy Bible, King James Version (Project Gutenberg #10). Gen. 32:26–29; 33:1; 35:10; Ruth 1:2–6, 1:18–22; 4:15–17—documenting the narrator's persistence in using former names.
The Bible, Russian Synodal translation: Genesis, Chap. 17 (azbyka.ru). Verses 1–7: God's covenant with Abraham and the bestowal of a new name.
The Bible, Russian Synodal translation: Genesis, Chap. 32 (azbyka.ru). Verses 26–29: Jacob's nocturnal wrestling and naming as Israel.
The Bible, Russian Synodal translation: Ruth, Chap. 1 (azbyka.ru). Verses 16–22: Naomi's return and her request to be called Mara.
Shakespeare W. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Project Gutenberg #100). Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2: dialogue on the rose and family surnames.
Laozi. The Tao Teh King, or the Tao and its Characteristics, trans. James Legge (Project Gutenberg #216). Chap. 1: on the unnameable and constant name of the origin of all things.
Plato. Cratylus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Project Gutenberg #1616). Hermogenes' passage (384c–d) on the conventional nature of names and Socrates' counter-inquiries.
Epictetus. A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion, trans. George Long (Project Gutenberg #10661). Discourses, II.10: deriving moral duties from human social roles.
The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (Project Gutenberg #2800). Surah 49, verse 11: religious prohibition against mutual defamatory nicknames.
Zhuangzi. Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, trans. Herbert A. Giles (Project Gutenberg #59709). Chap. I: dialogue between Yao and Xu You on the vanity of reputation as a shadow.
Schumann S., Zohny H. Does attitude importance moderate the effects of person-first language? A registered report. PLOS ONE, 2025 (PMC12507193). Preregistered experiment (N=681 across all stages, analytical sample cleared of 95 participants failing memory check); third-party appraisals.
Kang J., Baes N., Wu A., Haslam N. Who you are or what you have: Historical trends in identity-first and person-first language in books and news media. PLOS Mental Health, 2026 (PMC13580993). Corpus analysis of Google Books (1980–2019) and NOW (2010–2025) across 15 conditions.
Chayinska M., Uluğ Ö. M., Solak N., Kanık B., Çuvaş B. Obstacles to Birth Surname Retention Upon Marriage: How Do Hostile Sexism and System Justification Predict Support for Marital Surname Change Among Women? Frontiers in Psychology, 2021, 12 (PMC8520949). Three cross-sectional surveys (N=118, 131, 140) regarding marital surname change in the context of Turkish legal codes.
Gaskins L. C., McClain C. R. Visible name changes promote inequity for transgender researchers. PLOS Biology, 2021, 19(3) (PMC7943012). Perspective piece addressing ORCID mechanisms without primary quantitative datasets.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. Explores themes of inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author of United Wisdom. Beyond research work, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding operate in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.