Ok school sysadmins. Hear me out. Your email policy is super important for gender identity.

As someone that has managed a LOT of student email systems I have evolved my approach to this over time. Probably still evolving.

I think it's important to allow students the ability to change their names. You should have an email policy supporting this.

I see SO MANY schools that still don't.

At minimum you allow display names to reflect this. Ideally you enable the email address to be changed as well.

There isn't any good reason to force students to use a name in the system that doesn't reflect their identity.

Email identity propagates to EVERYTHING. It's in every school gradebook, every school homework and class list, and now it's up *front and center* in video conferencing.

I encourage you to make it part of your IT *mission* to support students by ensuring that email and digital identity directories reflect gender identity.

Working with your school's student support/services team to make this happen is a good, process oriented step. Make IT part of the solution, not a part of the problem.