I know my name

With my carte de séjour, carte vitale and Cpam and mutuelle, identification was no problem.

Everything identifies me in my time-honoured married name, including the much-prized and important carte de séjour.

I have dual nationality, and two passports in my married name. It is a name I have had for 50 years. One that has been on passports, UK driver’s licence etc.

However, I have now had, much to my annoyance, an identity change. My French driving licence permis de conduire finally arrived after 11 long months made out in my maiden name. Naturally, this matches absolutely nothing in my otherwise normalised French identity. It is unique and apparently unchangeable.

A compromise would be both my maiden name and married name. It happened before computerised application. Today, the computer says “non”.

This department uniquely and inconveniently does not appear to recognise the married name of a woman as an authentic identification.

Post-computerisation and centralisation, it now has to be “only” her maiden name.

Out of curiosity, are there other women out there who have had the same recent difficulty? Who perhaps also object to their identity being decided by anonymous driving licence fonctionnaires.

An identity that does not correlate with anything else officially French. The permis de conduire cannot apparently be changed.

I am now considering going to our “ombudsman”. What do I do? All reasonable non-sexist suggestions requested.

Suzanne Calam-Hale, Hautes Pyrénées