My lovelies, I want to hear the wonderful stories of how your name came to you.
-
My name story goes like this.
In the dark of a spring night, I met myself for the very first time. I slept, exhausted.
With the dawn, I sought a guide. She nursed me, stunned, through my first day as myself. As night came, she asked me, gently, if I knew my name. I did not. I slept, wrapped in my acceptance of my femininity.
As I woke, my name was with me. She hid inside me through the morning, until I spoke her aloud while sitting beside my partner amidst a swirl of petals falling from the cherry blossoms.
That is how I met my name, “Willow.”
@Willow I think I always knew my name deep down even if it was hidden from me for most of my life. When I thought about what my name would be, I just knew it was Ciara, it just felt right
️ -
@Willow It was pretty simple for me. I wanted a name that a native French speaker could have while not sounding totally awful in English. (I also wanted a name that had a common/easy diminutive but that dropped real fast) Charlotte stuck out pretty fast as my only possibility as all the other options I was thinking about had someone close to me already named like that and I didn't want to "share" a name. I tried it out for like a month and the first time I had someone call me Charlotte orally, I had so much euphoria that I knew it was the one. One nice thing that I realized after the fact, is that I took the name of my late grandmother from my father side, the only one I didn't really have the chance to know.
-
@Willow When my egg finally cracked a voice in my head told me my name was Nicole 🥰
-
@Willow My story is well up the prosaic end: https://katyswain.me/about/journal/2023-11-16-1348
My name deliberately didn't have any meaning at first. Now quite a lot of people have never known me by any other name, others are getting the hang of it, and most of the above appear (against all odds) to quite like me.
So the significance of the name for me is that it's attached to somebody that people like. I could never have engineered anything more satisfying.
-
@Willow I had been reading about Amelia Earhart in the weeks leading up to coming out to myself as trans. I accepted myself as a woman on July 1st, 2023 (thanks to @Impossible_PhD ‘s wonderful blog) and chose Amelia the next day. Somehow I didn’t put two and two together at the time that July 2nd was the anniversary of her disappearance (despite obviously having read it at the time).
Anyway, she’s so incredibly awesome.
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward.”
-
@Willow a long, long time ago I had a tragic set of incidents that nearly killed me. It helped me realize that I wanted to live (a nice change of pace) but I didn't know what to live for. My high school girlfriend put a book in my hands where the main character learns that the point of being alive is to love and be loved by others.
Ever since then, every time I've had a chance to name someone in my life, it's been a name from the book.
Naturally, I did the same for myself. And that's how my wonderful 17 year old cat and I are named after twin sisters.
-
@Willow one of my favourite poems is Jabberwocky, the first stanza of which Lewis Carol published as satire of the trend at the time of "discovering" (read: fabricating) anglo-saxon verse. so he published a poem which was almost all made up words.
i used to use random words from that stanza as character names in games. Mimsy was my favourite. in a game where i needed a nickname and a longform name, i decided Mimsy could be short for Miriam.
…
@miriamrobern This is such a cool way to choose a name.
-
@Willow didn't put much thought into it, tbh. I wanted something short n sweet, with the same first initial as my birth name. it works
@inherentlee I really wish I'd stuck with the same initial, but a) didn't think of that in time b) there's no suitable masc names for me that start with H, everyone I've mentioned it to agrees on this
-
@Willow I had been reading about Amelia Earhart in the weeks leading up to coming out to myself as trans. I accepted myself as a woman on July 1st, 2023 (thanks to @Impossible_PhD ‘s wonderful blog) and chose Amelia the next day. Somehow I didn’t put two and two together at the time that July 2nd was the anniversary of her disappearance (despite obviously having read it at the time).
Anyway, she’s so incredibly awesome.
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life and the procedure. The process is its own reward.”
@lif3form this is amazing! She is so cool. A band I love have a concept album about her and her last flight.
-
@Willow It came to me in a dream!
In the dream a stranger introduced herself to me and then I introduced myself by saying "I'm Eric." She said oh that's a nice name and I said "yeah, I always liked it since I know a kid called Eric in school." When I woke up, I realized I did go to school with an Eric but was it also true that I'd been pining for the name ever since? idk
Thinking of how my parents named my brother, a crossover of German and Norwegian names, I chose to spell Erik with a k.
-
@Willow A long time ago a friend said "you look like a Samantha"....
-
My name is similar to my deadname, but not related in a Victor/Victoria sense. It was designed to be boring, reflecting the stealth that so many of us from the mesozoic era had.
My middle name is where I have a little flair. I learned of it in French class.
I also changed my surname, it was something that I think was nore common last century, when stealth drove us to not want to be found.
It all seemed logical at the time but now it seems a bit odd.
-
@Willow My legal first name is a diminutive/nickname of my old name. My old name is quite feminine and very common for "girls" of my age group. My new name is gender-neutral sounding and has the masculine spelling (although I have seen guys with it spelled other ways too.)
I partially picked it because when I told my grandmother at age 4 that I wanted to be a boy, although she didn't let me live like a boy she did let me do more boy-ish things as a girl, including bestowing the nickname (spelling and all) upon me.
As a nonbinary/polygender adult I enjoy having a gender ambiguous name, although sometimes I wish I had changed my name to a noun of some kind.
My middle name is my maternal grandfather's first name. I took it initially as I was heavily inspired by work he did in his spiritual community.
I am planning to change my surname this year. I think I want it to be a name from a book series I love. It is also an ambiguous noun, and appeals to me on multiple avenues of interest.
-
@Willow@chaosfem.tw
It's a multi-step process that started long before my egg had cracked: in online forums and games I used the nickname Albantar, which was a rehashing of my full deadname Alb----- Ant----- Ar------. Some time after The Crackening, I renamed myself to Mx. Alba in an online game that I played a lot then, and I liked it... The renaming of Albantar to Mx. Alba gradually spread across more and more online spaces, and eventually I also took it as my official name, which is now Alba Ant----- Ar------. -
@Willow "Sebastian" is simply a name I've loved for a long time.
"Kat" ought to be obvious, even if the spelling is Germanic rather than English. It's not short for anything; I'm just (a) Kat.I've used variations of this name online since the '90s. So when I came out to myself and then my partner in quick succession, it was already there as though it always had been.
For all practical purposes, it had.It's an annoyingly collision-prone name, admittedly. It partially overlaps with that of a family member and an old friend, and coming out to each of them will involve a little diplomacy. Then there were the first friends to whom I came out: "wait, does that make six trans women called Kat that we know?!"
Lastly, it's turned out to be a difficult name for Spaniards, who are prone to rendering it as "Cass". That's close enough, since for a while I considered taking Cassandra as a middle name for the obvious/usual reason.
My partner has teased me about all of these issues, but agrees that there never were any other options. Ironically, given the handles I've iterated through, it's the name I've felt the least choice in, other than my legal one.
-
@Willow There is so much to this...
Nicola is a feminine version of my necronym, and I've been using some version of "Nicola" in games since I was a teenager, long before my egg cracked. As for why "Nicola"... I hated "Nicole", I was a major Doctor Who fan, and the actress who played Peri on the show was named Nicola, which was a name I liked far more. So...
The name "Nicola" in its variations... the meaning has more meaning to me now than before. "Victory of the People". I wonder if my parents would have named me that if they knew its meaning...
Finally, my necronym, in its entirety, came from my grandfathers. I wanted to keep that part of me; I wanted to keep that legacy in some form, even after transition.
@NicolaElle this is the first time i have seen "necronym"and i love it! {yoink!} @Willow
-
@Willow
I tricked my mother into naming me before I had even come out to her. She was already over 80. I live in Japan, but tried to visit her in the US once every year or two. So I was sitting with her, and casually asked, "Mom, did you have a name planned for me if I had been born a girl?" Without even a pause, she said, "Rachel. Your older sisters are named for women from the Bible whose names began with 'R', so the third would have been Rachel." I eventually came out to her. It was fine. -
@Willow My first name is nothing particularly special. It had a very loose similarity with my deadname, and had used it in private for a while. My middle name was a bit more involved - though I won't write it here. I'll just say it's both related to a place I have a personal connection to as well as a person I admire.
-
@Willow it’s a short version of my birth name, and I’d been using it in emails and online for decades before I realized I could use it all the time in real life too. Extremely prosaic
-
@Willow (using my alt account because i'm still very much in the closet): mine wasn't really chosen. I signed up for a videogame beta (the online part of URU: Ages beyond Myst) around summer 2003, was rejected because my specs were a bit low. Since I was a HUGE Myst fan I didn't care if it worked like shit, I wanted to see it, so I applied again saying i had more ram, as "my sister" and just wrote the first name that came to my mind, the name from a girl I knew from an IRC channel.
So I kinda found myself after a caffeine trip into a (virtual) desert with Peter Gabriel music playing (he wrote a song for it), a very 90s cliché I guess. Kinda appropiate also that one of the game's taglines during the beta was "a game where you are you" as a play on URU.
I'm currently looking into how to mod something in the game to honor this.
It's a shame it took me until 2019 to understand that creating a separate persona as a girl and basically my entire online identity becoming that persona wasn't a very cis thing to do.
