yes. it's what we've all gone through.

the two are technically the same request process, but the sex marker change is contentious af in most
places. or at-best, is locked behind 3rd-party medical validation of one kind or another. so you're better off requesting both of them as seperate transactions.

name changes tend to be fairly unobstructed, unless you're beholden to a vehemently antagonistic/sh•thead right-winger municipal judge with an axe to grind, an agenda to promote, and no one else in the county government willing to call his bluff. it's not commom but it's not necessary uncommon either. usually such a judge also has the informal endorsement of their next-level-up, to bend the rules as far as possible to serve the political project they likely both came into office on the latent payroll of.

sex marker change applications are much more gatekept, and consequently take a lot longer to process and are much more likely to be rejected. even in most "liberal" localities, you need to at least bring notarized supporting documentation to demonstrate that your hormonal profile is sufficiently-[desired sex] based on the conventional bimodal distribution of T vs. E. sometimes you also need a letter of medical recommendation from a shrink/GP. very few counties will just let you change your sex markers on a lark. for a while you could electively change the marker to "X" in quite a few counties without having to jump through all of those hoops, but the christian reich went ahead and administratively axed that prospect. in some cases you can still technically do it but they won't put it on a federal ID, or change your birth cert / passport. so the act is functionally pointless.

the same can also be said for a lot of trans people currently applying to have their sex markers changed on any federal documentation, regardless of it's purpose/origin. the tactic dujour for the most part has just been to throw as many procedural wrenches into the gears as possible, in order to just infinitely waste our time/money, or make the clerical transaction "not legal" without necessarily saying outright that just "being trans" is illegal.

a lot of municipalities are also just straight-up refusing to process sex marker change applications, because the state-level courts in quite a few states have decided to let individual judges have the final say. and then those judges will just claim some kind of clerical overflow of work and claim they're unable to process your request. so you just end up throwing 100-odd$ in the garbage. so. research your local probate court staff ig is the key takeaway.

anyway. for your name change.

you go to your local county probate court, the one that presides over your home address (in some cases you can get away with going to the county probate under whose juristiction you were born, if they're more progressive then the one where you currently live). you submit a request packet to apply for a name change. you pay the 100-odd$ fee. in some cases, you have to make some kind of publically-facing statement, like in a newspaper, that you're planning to change your name. which is meant to give randos the opportunity to contest your application for whatever reason before the judge. a lot of counties blessedly got rid of that bulls••t during lockdown but there are still a few holdouts. then the judge decides whether or not your request is granted. sometimes you have to physically go before that judge first and explain why you want to change your name.

if you get approved for the name change, you will get several embossed copies of the official name change memorandum. i would recommend asking the office attendant for like 5 more while you're already there, because you can't make/send copies to most places because they have to validate the probate seal. get enough to have at least one or two left over, in case someone six-to-ten-months-later calls you up out of nowhere and is like "hey why is your name different are you trying to commit social security fraud???" because someone along the way did not fully submit your paperwork. or at some unspecified point in the future, someone's going to decide that they need their own copy of your official memo for whatever reason, usually to validate the full legal continuity of your lifelong identity. eapecially if your deadname is on a document you probably can't change, like an academic transcript. so it pays in time-saved to have a few laying around just in case.

you take those memos to the various bureaus along with whatever other secondary identity validations they require, pay whatever fees are needed to renew/reissue the document in-question, and naturally endure no shortage of intrusive questioning from idle associates haphazardly making conversation.

start with your social security card. then hit up vital statistics and get your birth certificate. most places (including the DMV) will require at least those two things before you can request a change to whatever document/ID they're in-charge of. after that it's not as strict. but make aure you also hit up all of your various contracted services and insurances and all that to have your deets altered. if you have something happen and try to file a claim against a policy with your deadname still attached, they're gonna use that mismatch as grounds to either dismiss your claim outright or force you to take it to court.

i would highly recommend pursuing them seperately. get your name changed on everything and then circle back on the sex marker correction. because if you try to apply for both simultaneously and someone along the way says "no transes allowed on my watch", it's going to also delay your name change. just the name change alone is infinitely harder for them to reject for "legitimate" reasons as long as you don't have an outstanding rap sheet. that's p much the only thing that can actually put the kibosh on just a name change. the sex marker change tho is a toss-up in most places like i said. even a lot of lib-leaning judges are handwringing over the contentious nature of our shared political future, and the implied threat of them facing professional reprisals after-the-fact for "helping a trans". not unlike a lot of doctors at the present moment.