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by busterarm 802 days ago
For the vast majority of people you can tell by given name and surname.

You get around this by picking a gender-ambiguous nickname and using that as your given name. Ariel, Logan, Dakota, Drew, Jordan, etc.

Surnames are harder, but you're aiming for ambiguity. Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones and Brown -- e.g., the five most common African American surnames. Other options like Kim and Lee will also get you far here.

1 comments

I could see a different given name, but a different surname? Won't that throw up some red flags once HR starts on boarding you? Or what about referrals, gotta make sure to coordinate with them.
I said harder. Like change your name hard.

One company I worked for hired a woman once who had a completely fraudulent identity and gave different identification entirely to the person we were interviewing/hired and she justified it to HR saying she was running away from an abusive relationship. Her paychecks were even different than the name in the employee directory!

We only found out long after she'd stopped working with us when she made the news for trying to murder a stranger while high on drugs. She had made the news and was on camera with a completely unfamiliar name to us.