After being pressured by leading government officials at the Ministry of Justice, the registry office contacted Kapalova and requested that they be allowed to reverse their decision. Kapalova refused and decided to take her case to the Constitutional Court, the highest court in Kyrgyzstan.
“There was a time when I wanted to give up. I wanted them to stop pressuring me, it’s been non-stop,” she said. “But now this is about women’s rights in Kyrgyzstan.”
Kapalova said that the reaction from the government made her realise that this issue was bigger than her – which is why she is trying to change the law by taking the case to the Constitutional Court.
Kapalova said she is not the first in the region to request a patronymic change, and she knows of women who would like to change the names of their children from the patronymic to the matronymic form. “Many wanted to give their names to their kids, but it’s not possible,” she said about women in Osh, in southern Kyrgyzstan.
Kapalova is right. Similar cases can be found across Central Asia.
Matronymics illegal in Kazakhstan too
In Kazakhstan, Irra Belfer – who is an activist for women’s reproductive rights and disability rights, and has worked in several executive roles in the country’s NGO sector – recently petitioned the government about changing her own patronymic to her mother’s name.
“I cannot understand why I should carry the name of someone who did not play a meaningful role in my life and in my upbringing,” Belfer said.
“When I went to the registry office to change my name, the woman at the desk said it was impossible to change my name to a matronymic,” she said. “That’s when I wrote the Ministry of Justice.”
Belfer received an ambiguous letter from Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Justice (similar to the response Kapalova received). The letter said that while both parents or legal guardians of a child have the right to decide whether or not to give their child a patronymic, no law existed for children to receive a matronymic.
Kapalova and Belfer are just two women among many who are bound by the patriarchal confines of cultural and linguistic politics, which have been established and upheld by the state.
While changing one’s name in both countries is a tedious bureaucratic process (which can often be sped up via informal avenues of bribes and favours), gendered naming conventions seem to be set in stone.
Gendered naming conventions
A 2019 investigation into how legislation about name changes in different countries targets trans people, directly or indirectly, found that a transgender person in Kyrgyzstan can change their name, provided it matches their gender marker.
The country’s 2003 Family Code (which regulates marriage and property relations between partners) previously stated that “changes and amendments to civil registries are made when it is necessary to change name, patronymic and surname due to change of sex (of hermaphrodites) upon a statement issued by the medical institution that performed a sex change.” This section on naming was struck down in August last year, giving insight into the precarity of Kyrgyzstan’s legal system.
Print
Radio Free | Radio Free (2021-04-27T06:02:17+00:00) In the name of the mother: the fight over naming politics in Central Asia. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/27/in-the-name-of-the-mother-the-fight-over-naming-politics-in-central-asia/
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