A friend and partner are looking for a low-cost way to establish legal residency in San Francisco, in order to improve the odds of getting a sympathetic judge for a legal case to strike down the requirement to state a gender on name-change paperwork. If you can help, please get in touch!
More details below:
"For legal reasons (I'll explain a bit in a comment below) my spouse and I are interested in establishing part-time residency in San Francisco, for the next year to three years. Apparently the requirement is simply to have a place leased, where we can stay some of the time. (Similar to how having a vacation home allows you to clame residency.)
If you have a room in your apartment or house that gets used as a guest-room, and you'd be willing to formally lease it out to us (or sublease if you're a renter that has the right to do that), we would only expect to be there a few times per month at the most, and might not be there at all some months. I might crash after the opera from time to time, [my partner] might crash after a goth club, etc... If you have actual guests coming that want to use the room, we can make sure to make other arrangements, and we'd be neat/quiet when visiting. We're hoping to keep the cost down to $100/mo or less.
Background: We are planning to file some name-change paperwork, on which my spouse, who is trans*, will decline to state a gender. At that point the expectation is that the county will reject the paperwork, at which point our lawyer -- a prominent activist who was Finance Chair of the No on 8 campaign and is consulting with the Transgender Law Center -- will ask the courts to strike down the requirement to state an M/F gender. This strategy recently worked in Oregon.
Ultimately the case can be appealed all the way to the CA Supreme Court, if it has to be, but our lawyer would strongly prefer to start the case out in the SF district courts, rather than San Mateo, because there are a number of older, more-conservative judges in San Mateo; we're more likely to end up with a positive decision at the outset, and all of the best studies on trans* issues entered into the factual record, if we start with a friendly judge. Hence, we need to establish SF residency so we can file the name change there. We would maintain the residency until the case is resolved."
More details below:
"For legal reasons (I'll explain a bit in a comment below) my spouse and I are interested in establishing part-time residency in San Francisco, for the next year to three years. Apparently the requirement is simply to have a place leased, where we can stay some of the time. (Similar to how having a vacation home allows you to clame residency.)
If you have a room in your apartment or house that gets used as a guest-room, and you'd be willing to formally lease it out to us (or sublease if you're a renter that has the right to do that), we would only expect to be there a few times per month at the most, and might not be there at all some months. I might crash after the opera from time to time, [my partner] might crash after a goth club, etc... If you have actual guests coming that want to use the room, we can make sure to make other arrangements, and we'd be neat/quiet when visiting. We're hoping to keep the cost down to $100/mo or less.
Background: We are planning to file some name-change paperwork, on which my spouse, who is trans*, will decline to state a gender. At that point the expectation is that the county will reject the paperwork, at which point our lawyer -- a prominent activist who was Finance Chair of the No on 8 campaign and is consulting with the Transgender Law Center -- will ask the courts to strike down the requirement to state an M/F gender. This strategy recently worked in Oregon.
Ultimately the case can be appealed all the way to the CA Supreme Court, if it has to be, but our lawyer would strongly prefer to start the case out in the SF district courts, rather than San Mateo, because there are a number of older, more-conservative judges in San Mateo; we're more likely to end up with a positive decision at the outset, and all of the best studies on trans* issues entered into the factual record, if we start with a friendly judge. Hence, we need to establish SF residency so we can file the name change there. We would maintain the residency until the case is resolved."