would honestly prefer to give whoever needs it (this morning, an optometry office) a social security number equivalent and my public-persona handle rather than 1) the name I go by (which happens to be my middle name) and 2) my last name-including-how-to-spell-it, and then 3) disambiguating that from my full legal name, which has a different first name as well as a suffix

the full ritual as we perform it is too close to a cultural conflict and wildly inefficient. let me give you a guid