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Policy Guidance

If you are a UCSC community member (staff, faculty, students, volunteers, et cetera) collecting, processing, or reporting on gender and/or names through any systems or forms, you need to ensure the systems and the forms are in compliance with the University of California’s Gender Recognition and Lived Name (GRLN) policy. Compliance with the policy requires:

  • Providing a minimum of three equally recognized gender options: woman, man, and nonbinary.
  • Only collecting lived names of students, employees, alumni, and affiliates (e.g., on documents, in communications, and name displays in systems), except when legal names are required by regulations.
    • Generally, documents that the university provides to the federal government or in conjunction with Social Security Numbers require the use of legal names. This may include but is not limited to financial aid documents, payroll records, medical identification and records, federal immigration documents, and tax forms.
    • While legal names may be collected for reporting to third parties, only communicate to the individual using their lived name.
    • If you believe that the system or form you use has to use legal names, please fill out this GRLN Record a Required Use of Legal Names form that helps track these cases.
  • Legal names must be kept confidential and accessible only to users who have a legitimate business need.
  • If the system or form you use has extenuating circumstances that hamper full compliance with the GRLN policy by December 31, 2023, please fill out this GRLN Request for Policy Compliance Extension form. The GRLN Steering Committee will review the requests and the Chancellor or their designees will determine if limited extension is granted.

The following flowchart provides a reference for you to check if an IT system storing names is in compliance with the GRLN policy.

a flowchart to check if an IT system storing names is in compliance with the GRLN policy 

*: Please submit a GRLN Record a Required Use of Legal Names form.
Click here for a PDF version of the flowchart

The following flowchart provides a reference for you to check if a form collecting names is in compliance with the GRLN policy.

 a flowchart to check if a form collecting names is in compliance with the GRLN policy

*: Please submit a GRLN Record a Required Use of Legal Names form.
Click here for a PDF version of the flowchart

 

If you have any questions, contact the Gender Recognition and Lived Name Steering Committee at grln@ucsc.edu.