So I've been thinking on it a lot, and I really want to change my name. It isn't really for gender issues or anything like that, but I do have a lot of negative feelings towards my given name and just want to pick something that feels more like 'me' and has less attachment to, idk, my abusive family or something. But I'm kind of in a rut on figuring out what exactly to change to. So this is kind of an open thread for any of you who have changed your names in some form or another.. how did you choose your new name? Did you just try out a few names you thought sounded nice? Did you name yourself after family or friends or celebrities that you like and care about? Did a certain name just resonate with you? I'm curious, and maybe the anecdata will help me pick out a new name for myself.
Hey there! I went shopping for a new name a few months ago. I'd been thinking about one for quite a while but I did so much waffling I was starting to wonder if I'd ever decide. What helped me was set a few guidelines for myself: Choosing a letter or letters I wanted the name to start with - I knew that I wanted to keep my initial the same because I really like the letter R, so that immediately narrowed things down a lot Limiting which language groups I was okay with the name being from (because it felt like it'd be weird to be someone who has no connection with whatever language and culture to have a name from that language/culture) Choosing names that had meanings pleasing to me - the vast majority of the time no one is going to know or care about what my name means, but it it's important to me and that's what matters Looking through the resulting list and saying the names in my head and paying attention to what made me go 'eeeeh' and what felt good, which I did concurrently with Changing my local alias on chat programs so I could 'try out' the potential names in an easy-to-change, inobtrusive way - seeing different names attached to my words helped me sort out which ones did and didn't feel like 'me' It helped a lot that after step 3 my list of names was only three or four names long, but even if it had been longer steps 1 and 2 were essential in narrowing things down. Step 5 really helped in making a final decision - there were some names I thought would be fitting that felt REALLY WEIRD to see attached to my words, and it would have sucked to have chosen one of those only to realize later that whoops, this one makes me uncomfortable too.
I stole @Bel Kadros 's name so.....i am an outlier adn should not be counted. I mean, I guess...I kind of took my birthname as a base, because i wasn't ready to come out to my parents and I needed something close enough to my birthname that they wouldn't ask questions when they found out that I was going by another name. It's not a perfect fit, but its close enough.
sorry for the delay in response, but thank you guys for your input! @Mercury thank you for sharing your guidelines also. i'm going to make a list and work on narrowing them down.
well, my first-name is a no-brainer; my birth name was jessica, but basically everyone on planet earth has called me jesse since long before i knew i was trans. my middle name took some thought. there's no male equivalent to katherine. i considered kieran, to keep the same initials, but naming myself after my oc seemed a little goofy. :P in the end i chose garnet, after my maternal grandfather. i kind of like that it's a non-gendered name, even though i'm not nb. and grandpa garnet was not only a role model and someone i loved very much, who died long before i was ready to lose him, he's the person in my family i most resemble, personality-wise. he had this great talent for understatement. the letters he wrote my grandmother from the pacific fleet during world war 2 were masterpieces like that; he'd say things like "yesterday was pretty busy, some airplanes came by and everyone got a little excited about it." naming myself after him makes me feel connected with him and with my family. so i guess my advice would be to think about people you resonate with, people who feel like the kind of person you want to be.
At first I thought about asking my mom what she would have named me if I'd been AMAB, but then the name turned out to be Sebastian and I couldn't stop thinking about the Little Mermaid, so that was out. After that I just kind of started keeping a list of names I liked, like, every time I came across a cool name in fiction I would write it down and save it for later, and eventually I came across "Henry" and it clicked. For my middle name, I was originally going for "Danger"- I don't even remember what my reasoning was, I guess it just sounded cool, but then the Nickelodeon show "Henry Danger" came out and I was like... shit. So for now I'm just keeping my middle name, even though it's pretty feminine (Janelle).
I have a trans guy friend named Logan and I made all the Wolverine jokes at him and then he went to Japan and I could make so many more.
I'm not trans, but I loath my given name, and I changed it in college. I went with a diminutive of my middle name (Rose ->Rosie). I like to come up with other names for myself though, and I usually use them in stories or rpgs. Something usually inspires it externally (like the time I called myself Anduril because I had just discovered Lord of the Rings), though like Mercury said, starting with a letter or meaning can set you on your way. For something that might be more helpful for you, my best friend is a trans guy and goes by Kas, short for Kasper. He chose it because Kas is nice and unisex, though Kasper leans more masculine. For his new middle name, he asked his parents, and they suggested Richard, a family name. That might not be helpful if you're trying to get away from an abusive family though.
Oh golly, I love to talk about this, because my name change juuuuuust got made legal at the beginning of this year, I believe! But, hmm... My name chance selection was... Really easy, at least for me. My original name was something that ends in a -ly sound, and while I was dating someone before I realized I was trans, I often assumed a male persona online, etc. Well, they started calling me 'Lee', and then on sites I'd sign up with some variation of 'Lee', so... For like two years before I even realized that I was trans, I more or less was going by Lee everywhere online. It also made it much easier to get people in meatspace to use it, since it was part of my name to begin with!
So I am NB! I didn't ever really care for my name, and even as a child I toyed with the idea of changing it. And it always seemed to gravitate to plant/flower names I guess. Although Rowan was a suggestion made by someone on kintsugi, I did eventually go "yep, that's the one!" I haven't decided what to change my middle name to yet, as it is also fairly stupid and doesn't match.
There's obviously nothing wrong with 'trying on' different names, of course, and if you've got the time, especially for something as inconsequential as a middle name, I encourage you to do so... Especially before submitting any legal paperwork for a change, because that shit is expensive. I just kept my middle name because it was given in honor of my grandmother and I'm proud to have it.
I'm honestly considering just dropping my middle name altogether. It's not uncommon for people to not have one at all. Though if I can come up with something decent I'll just go with that. Middle names feel less important to me because they usually don't matter to other people. I also seem to gravitate towards plant/flower names and nature-y names in general so that's sort of where I'm starting my search. My criteria right now is I'd prefer something that isn't super gendered. Like, it can be a typical boy or girl's name but it can't.. sound too gendered, to me, I guess. Like if I said my name was X someone could feasibly think that it is a gender neutral name even if it usually isn't. Another criteria I'm sort of considering is easiness of spelling. I'm not 100% on it having to be that way because I'm already used to spelling out my entire name whenever I give it. My current name is literally 3 uncommon spellings of 3 first names (yes, including my last name, it is an uncommon spelling of a first name) and it legitimately stresses me out. Especially the last name part, because when I go to like the doctor's and I get asked for my last name and I say a first name I have on more than one occasion been stared at like I'm a complete idiot and gotten the question repeated at me multiple times. Maybe if I at least pick a very basic and normal sounding last name though having to spell out my first name won't be such a big deal.
oh i'm in no panic at all, my middle name isn't in honor of anyone or something, but i kind of have to keep an eye out for what letter it starts with or else i'll end up with the initials "R.A.T" and that is just hilarious and sad at the same time.
I don't know why that made me laugh as hard as it did, but I am now. Make sure you avoid O as well then, because that would be just as unpleasant!
exactly. so many pitfalls when your name is perfect for dumb initials. I mean... my deadname initials are "A.R.T." sobs
I have not changed my name, and I am not considering it at all, but I just want to comment on the initials thing. These are mine: E.L.K.
well, uh. what happened for me when I was shopping for a male name is that I picked one out that I liked quite a lot, but my mom absolutely hated it. and then she just... named me? like she said "it'll just be my nickname for you" but I knew what was up. it's not a bad name, really, so I'm currently trying it out. but I don't think I would've picked it for myself necessarily.
I kind of want to change my name again because the reason I picked Bel over the other names I was considering was so my parents wouldn't figure out from my new name that I'm trans. Except that now they know and this name was never meant to be long term, just something I could feel comfortable in until I can get out and be safe. It fit okay this time last year, but...I think I'm kind of growing out of it? If that makes any sense. But of course I feel like I can't change my name again, because my parents were complete fucking dicks about the fact that I changed it the second time at all. I'd wait until I graduate high school and manage to go somewhere away from this stupid town, but I'm waiting to graduate for /pretty much everything else/, so I don't want to add another thing to the pile of things that feel like forever away. But honestly, Bel was just meant to be something people could call me that isn't my birth name or my old nickname. Something not overly gendered, so that I wouldn't feel dysphoric just from someone trying to get my attention. Bel Capricorn was meant to be an online identity, so that's fine and I'll keep that indefinitely. But I'm not who I was last year and whether or not that person was Bel, I'm....not anymore. Hm.
I've talked about this elsewhere, I think, but I changed my name when I was 12, and further changed it when I was 13 or 14. My given name is Johanna Denise. Johanna is pronounced jo-ANN-uh, but it's been mispronounced my entire life, and it never fit me. I went through a variety of potential names (rejected ones include Joan, JD, Jo, Jody, Jane, Jade, and Jean), but after a while, I decided to try out Anna. I first tried it out "in the wild" at summer camp, and somehow it just clicked. It felt like it had always been my name. So when I started junior high, I began asking people to call me Anna. Even my family calls me that now--a few old family friends have permission to call me Jo, but I explicitly gave them permission. The thing is, my surname (which, since this board is currently public, I'm not sharing right now due to harassment issues) sounds similar enough to Nicole that I was relentlessly teased with Anna Nicole Smith jokes. And when you're a middle schooler, that shit gets old super fast. So I decided to choose a middle name, since Denise had never fit well either. Now, I didn't want to go with Dee, which was the only name I could think of that could spring from Denise, so I picked one completely different. I eventually decided on Cassidy--she was a character from a webtoon, and while the character wasn't a favorite of mine, I liked her name a lot, and Anna Cassidy flowed super well. So I've been Anna Cassidy N. since then. (That's where Acey comes from! Anna Cassidy ==> AC ==> Acey.) My artist name is Acey Jane (mild corruption of surname), with Jane usually shortened to J. I picked Jane partly because of Homestuck, but also because John is a family name (Johanna and Jane are both feminine forms of John), and I wanted to keep that tradition going. Plus, J. as a middle initial is a common thing in cartoons (I think it dates back to Rocky and Bullwinkle, but it's also common in Matt Groening's work--Homer J. Simpson, Bart J. Simpson, Philip J. Fry--and he's a huge inspiration to me), and since I want to be a cartoonist, I found it fitting.
Something that mattered to me that hasn't been mentioned here: number of syllables and placement of emphasis. Part of what made my birth name so uncomfortable and not-mine was that the emphasis was on the second syllable out of three. There are lots of pretty names like that, but none of them belong attached to me.
