My lovelies, I want to hear the wonderful stories of how your name came to you.

@Willow A long time ago a friend said "you look like a Samantha"....

@Willow

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.

@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.

@Willow my first name was what I always knew my name would be “if I were a girl.” my middle names are one that is what my parents would’ve named me if they’d known, and one that every woman in my matriarchal line has as her middle name, so I picked… both! it’s not an amazing story but my names just clicked into place

@nicolexyz @Willow a good choice (I’m not biased)

@Willow I inherited mine from my great-great-great grandmother according to a written account from my great grandmother, she was a strong-willed and independent woman, and I wanted to tap into some of that energy!

I almost went with Tillie, after my badass lesbian great aunt Matilda, but that’s a little too similar-sounding to my sister’s name

@Willow Once upon a time a 9 year old girl found herself wandering in imaginary worlds, and wondered what her name was.
She picked up something long and whimsical, and went by it for a time.
A decade or so later, half of it got dropped, and more streamlined latter half have been used as an online alt every now and then.
Around then she tried to assert herself in the real world, and everything got shattered.
She became a memory, abandoned in a one off world, in a little house floating in a cloudy void with no up or down.
A decade later i started transitioning, so i found her remains and scavenged them for parts.
I picked her name, shortened it some more, added a fresh coat of paint, and here we are.

@Willow So, my naming story is about as bland as they come, but I'll share it. It's a chunk of my deadname.

My name as given at birth was hyphenated because my parents couldn't decide which culture should get to name me, so they went with "both". It was also, as far as I know, globally unique. Not just the entire name, but even just the first name, there was only one in the world, and it was me, since it was two semi-common names from two wildly different cultures stuck together with a hyphen.

One of those names was "Kim". Him is not gender-ambiguous in the way, say, Pat is, where it could be short for either Patrick or Patricia but they're both from the same culture and overlap. It's gender-variant based on culture. In most western English cultures, it's assumed to be feminine. In Korea, it's assumed to be masculine. It's apparently also assumed to be masculine in French Canada. I have never heard of this outside of my family, but I'm assured that it's true. And I guess there's Kim Mitchell as evidence of that.

So, since I was already #####-Kim, I just dropped the ##### and became Kim.

Why? Because I thought it would be a bridge for my parents, and because it allowed me to easily go by Kim in a lot of contexts without having to go through the hassle of changing my legal name right away, since I assumed people would accept it as a short form of my name just the way they had accepted ##### by itself as a short form of my name.

Did that work out? No. If anything, I think it made my parents dig in even harder (because they felt like #####-Kim still included Kim so what was my problem), and places like the post office and so on still hassled me about picking up packages and everything. But by the time I changed my legal name it had stuck, and I went with Kimberly legal, Kim for short.

If I did it over agian, would I choose Kim? Probably not. But I'm kind of too old to change my name twice at this point.

@bright_helpings harold. you could be a harold

@bright_helpings OR A HUMPERDINCK

@inherentlee this HAS been suggested by a good friend of mine!!!

@bright_helpings @inherentlee Herik

@Willow It's right that my name came to me because it's less that I searched it on purpose and more I read it somewhere and it stuck with me. I just stumbled upon it, for a lack of better world