What was it like choosing your own name?

Mostly vibes, with a small amount of "how many good pun usernames can I squeeze out of this" (an em dash is a thing in typography, and Em is a nickname for Emily).

I went through a big list of names intended for new parents to name their children, noted all the ones I might like, filtered out anything that seemed like it'd be annoying to use in practice (already taken by someone I know*,**, hard for people to spell, or things like Erin with a high probability of being misheard as Aaron when said over the phone by someone with a deep voice), and picked Sophie. Then I changed my mind a few weeks later and picked Emily instead, then half changed my mind again when I was filling out name change paperwork and now I am Emily Sophie Lastname.

I changed my last name at the same time, to my partner's. I knew I wanted to do that eventually when we got married (I have negative affinity for my birth surname, and she had no desire to change hers and I had no desire to pressure her to), and changing your name once is easier than doing it twice.

* My deadname was very prone to running into name conflicts at work and receiving other people's emails, but I knew no Emilies at the time. In the ~3 years since coming out professionally, I have met no less than five of them, all through work. I tried.

** A friend who shares my deadname transitioned and called themself Kate. At one point after this but before my own realization, my partner offhandedly asked me what name I would take if I was trans, and I answered something like "well, I've always thought Kate is a nice name, but someone already took it".

I actually did so before I realized I was doing so.

My handle here, Thrabalen, is one that I use everywhere. I've even thought about legally changing it, partially because I'm a non-transitioning trans person and I'd love to ditch my deadname (it also has unfortunate associations), but also partially because I'm quite invested in it.

As for where it comes from... once upon a time, when megafauna ruled supreme and an ISP could charge an hourly connection fee, I was heavily invested in an online cooperative gaming/fiction area. This name, Thrabalen, was a surname for a group of characters, a surname I created from whole cloth. The name has grown on me so much, and I've invested so much of myself into it, that it represents me far better than a name that was bestowed upon me long before I had the capability to understand language, much less give my input.

For my current name, I had to thread a very tight line so as not to immediately out myself, so I needed a name that was masculine in my native language and feminine/ambiguous elsewhere. Kim was basically the only option, and also had the added bonus of starting with a K and being one syllable long, just like my old name.

My family was a little surprised, but my reasoning of "I want to choose my own identity" went over well enough without rousing too much suspicion. I'm sure they won't be too surprised when I come out to them later this year, but I needed to have control over that so I could come out on my own terms. Really my dad was more upset that I had planned to get rid of his surname and go by my mom's maiden name (already my middle name), so I basically ended up switching the places of the two names and he was content lmao

After I come out to my family, I'll change my name again to Dissonans (eng: Dissonance), to have something truly unique to go by. I'm already one of two people in the world with my combo of surnames - the other being my sister - so uniqueness is already part of it, but I want a name that is truly unique on its own. The reasoning was as follows:

• music term, as music is very important to me
• refers to my neurodivergence and difficulty interacting with non-autistic people
• refers to the deliberate "antisocial" stance of being super queer, weird, and unwilling to mask my autism
• unburdened by the expectations of gendered names; my name means me.

While the Norwegian law of personal names is somewhat strict, nothing in it says Dissonans would be explicitly not allowed. The worst case would be that it gets manually checked by a worker, whose decision can be appealed, and I've already thought of how I'd go about it. If I fail, I have a couple fallbacks that I know will work.

In changing my name even once already, I feel like I've kinda divorced my identity from having a name... getting my name legally changed to Dissonans would do a lot to make me feel connected to a moniker again, but I can just go by whatever regardless of my legal name anyway.

Really good question actually!

I initially had a few up in the air because my parents were no help lol, I asked them if they ever discussed what to name their child if they'd had an afab baby. They couldn't remember though so I looked to the interwebs for tips and among them was to try different ones on as usernames etc. But I ultimately landed on my current one when I saw it in writing, and had a bit of a eureka moment lol - I just saw it and suddenly realized that that's it! Sofie! It fit me in terms of personality and temperament.

There are quite a lot of trans women with very cutesy names, and I wanted to avoid that - and I also wanted to avoid something that was too unique because I don't want to stand out. And I also didn't want it to be foreign because again, so many of my peers choose English-sounding names or something rooted in Norse mythology etc. But I have always wanted to stealth if I could (and I luckily can now, after years of transitioning), so yeah I wanted something relatively typical/normal, that also wasn't too inappropriate/rare for my age.

So in the end, it wound up being more about what it wasn't going to be, if that makes sense. I looked up statistics just now and it's not in the top 20, but the 20th most common name is shared by 22000 people - mine is shared by over 19000, so it's probably still somewhere in the top 30 or 40 most common names in my country.

Nicknames was another added bonus since my deadname had zero possibilities for it and it's even used as a swear word, so imagine the bullying potential.. so yeah, thanks, parents! So that's a good thing about my chosen name, the couple of nicknames you can make from it: Sof/Soph and Fie - good luck pronouncing the latter if you aren't Danish by the way, it's unique to Denmark (and Norway too maybe, not sure). Anyway nicknames are pretty nice to have for those that are the very closest to you and it makes you feel special!

Thanks for posting this thread, got my brain going 😅

I am not trans and have not changed my name (nor do I have any intention to), but I just wanted to share something nice my parents did:

They opted against determining my sex before I was born and left it as a surprise. When they were thinking about names, they chose a feminine name and a masculine name that pair nicely together and that have a lot of meaning to my parents and the circumstances of my birth. I was born AFAB, and so I got the feminine name as my first name and the masculine name as my middle name. If I were to change my name, I would just swap them (and that would be very easily to do socially because I already like to use my middle name as a nickname).

I still haven't changed my name, even in practice -- even though it's pretty obviously gendered. Part of it is nervousness around making such a big change. Part of it is not feeling a ton of dysphoria about my name, since I'm not attempting to pass as cis anyway. And part of it is a struggle to find an alternative I actually like. The "BET" in my username is my initials, and I'm attached to them, but the pickings are slim for gender-neutral B names. Honestly I'd just go by "Sparky" if I could get away with that.

But anyway thanks for making this thread, it's good to read about others' experiences as they make these choices in order to inform how I approach it in future.

I picked out my current name while I was still identifying myself as agender rather than as a trans man, but it kinda just stuck. I couldn't figure out something else that I liked better that wouldn't be incredibly weird to other people, otherwise I would absolutely have named myself Sidonius which is probably my favourite name ever. (I'm using it as part of my pen name instead, which I guess works out in the end.) My main rule was to not pick a name of someone I already knew, family or otherwise.

The first name I have now was partially meant to be gender-neutral at the time (it's a different gender in different languages and I thought that was cool), but it was also just a name and spelling I really like anyway. My middle name choice I owe to wanting to keep an A name (my deadname started with A and, though I hated the name, I was attached to the way I sign my As) and a fairly well timed song on the radio in my mom's car one day. It's Latin though, and not everyone gets it right. When I was still deciding on names, I looked up advice aimed at parents picking out names for their kids and one of the suggestions was "if you want to give your kid a weird name, make it their middle name and give them a more average first name" which sounded reasonable to me, so I decided I'd roll with that.

I do kind of wish I'd thought about my first name choice longer, though. The name I have now is male in my first language (French), but I currently live in a mainly English-speaking area where that name usually reads female, so that's been a bit of a problem.

I haven't changed my name, but I've seriously considered it many times. Not my given name, though - my family name.

I have a fraught relationship with my family, so when I was young I would fantasize on changing it to anything else. I couldn't tell you what my list of potentials were exactly, but I can guarantee you that it was full of the greatest cringe you could expect from a preteen (I think one of them might have been "Amnesis". Oof.). When I got to adulthood I ended up living with my grandparents, and I loved them too much to break their heart with a change. By the time I moved out I was too worried about life's constant stream of emergencies to bother caring about it anymore.

The last time I considered changing my name was when I got married. That got nixed quickly though; state law would only allow me to change my name to my husband's last name or a hyphenated version of our combined names. I can count the number of times I have met members of his family on my fingers, so it didn't really make sense. We could have changed names via the usual legal means, but my husband wasn't interested in that, so we both kept our names.

I didn't change my name, but managed to kill a despised diminutive with prejudice.

My parents clearly wanted me to answer to a cutesy dainty girly nickname so trite that it featured in a song. The song was awful, the worst trivialization of femininity, with an earworm demi-melody that abraded my nerves like nails on a chalkboard. And they'd singsong it at me, introduce me to strangers with it... I'd just writhe with dysphoria because I was so abundantly not cute, dainty, or girly.

So at age 10 or so, I stopped answering to the nickname, and demanded that I be addressed by my full first name. I liked that name well enough. The symmetry of having the same number of syllables in first, middle, and surnames just felt right to my probably neurodivergent ears. I'm sure my parents were hurt when I rejected their loving appellation, but it felt like a lie, and I wasn't putting up with it.

If I had more social graces, I could probably have spun it as valuing the full name they'd chosen for me. My mother (who I appreciate more now that she's been dead for a while) still used the nickname whenever she was feeling particularly malicious, and she managed to come up with something even more awful (a diminutive of the diminutive). For decades afterwards, I'd find myself having to correct relatives and family friends because my mother insisted on writing and introducing me with her name for me. [That wrongness, and all the baggage that came with it, was probably responsible for another few months of therapy.]

And I still felt like an asshole for rigidly insisting on my right name. See "therapy", above.

I kind of ended up on my name almost by accident, mostly through a heavy dose of plausible deniability.

When I first came out to myself I wasn't necessarily ready to come out to the rest of the world, especially not yet to my family. I have always felt the need to be certain about things before committing to them publicly, and this was no different. However I really wanted to try out a more feminine name with the people that did know, one of whom was my partner. I chose the name Billie because it was a close enough derivative of my old name that I didn't think it would raise eyebrows if my family heard my partner calling me by it (and it did not).

It's now a year and a half after I came out to my family (and over three since I came out to myself!) and I feel like I am chafing against the name a little. It's commonly misspelled as Billy, and I think the similarity to my deadname has been conspiring to hinder my family's progress in updating their mental models of me as a woman. HRT is working wonders and I've not boymoded in months, but it's still 50/50 if I get gendered correctly, and I feel like when people find out my name they err on the side of masculine. I still like being Billie, and it feels truly like me, but I've been opting to introduce myself with my middle name more and more lately, as I think it sends a more immediately feminine signal.

My middle name is Eibhlín (pronounced "eve-lyn"), and I was a lot slower to pick it. I knew that I wanted it to begin with a vowel sound, and I knew that I wanted something Irish, and so I was reading lots about Irish folklore and traditional Gaelic names. For a time I settled on a different name which I can't remember now, but I wasn't fully enamoured with it. Quite out of the blue one day, I remembered that an old colleague had had a daughter with the name Evelyn. I had always very much liked that name, and I recognise now a degree of envy I felt towards this child I never met with a name that I loved. I looked up if there was a Gaelic version of it, and presto! I became Billie Eibhlín.

When I was around 6 years old I took ballet classes and there was this one girl called Rahel I was for some reason infuriated with (today I would say she was someone I aspired to be like).

The name and the concept of her stuck with me for my whole life.
I daydreamed all the time and in these stories I would most times be a girl/woman called Rahel (with different backstories). In games this would also be the name of the characters I played. In my late teenage years I played with the thought of naming my first daughter Rahel, but it just felt really wrong to me.

In conclusion it is a name that stuck with me for almost my whole life and it feels natural to use and associate myself with it.

I wrote a Chess ELO-style algorithm to start from a list of first names scraped from social security data and pit them 1v1 against each other (with the algorithm setup so that it only evaluated statistically close matchups rather than having to try every name against every other name). Once I'd whittled it down to a dozen or so I ended up picking one semi-random.

I approached things pretty analytically. (Perhaps I'm too much of an engineer.) I had a few requirements.

First, I wanted a name that was fairly typical of someone my age. I really didn't want a name that stood out much. Sometimes trans people will pick a name that is popular at the time they transition, and they end up with a name that is more typical of someone 20-30 years younger than they are. Fine if you want to do that, whatever makes you happy. But I wanted a name I could have been born with.

Second, my family handled things pretty well. And I come from a big Catholic family. And we were all named after saints (first and middle names.) So I wanted to pick a saint's name to maintain the pattern with my siblings. (I know this is a pretty unusual requirement.)

I also if possible wanted to keep my initials the same, as I have a long-running email address that uses them.

So, putting all that together, I settled on "Tanya." It's a short form of Tatiana, so it checks all the boxes. Plus I just liked the name.

My deadname is extremely common. Even before I knew I wanted a new name, I always hated it for that reason. The number of times I've heard my prior name called in public places was an annoyance, but also it meant it was a semi-regular name - characters in movies, names in songs, etc. I never enjoyed that.

When I came to the realization that I wanted to change my name, it was influenced by a few factors. First and foremost, I wanted my name to be short. Part of that was that I knew short names were easier for people to remember, and part of that is there's literally research on this which shows you get promoted more, paid more, etc. Past that point I knew that I wanted my name to be cute. So I started looking through websites and books and papers for lists of names - baby names, adult names, I didn't particularly care. I started a list of all the short/cute names that spoke to me. Most didn't, but at some point I had a list of about 10-15 names, with the thought that I would eventually be going through this list to try/choose one. But one day I ran across my name, Sigi, in a book and just knew immediately that it was the name. It was short and cute, different/rare enough to avoid confusion and something that's easy to pronounce in a lot of languages (although people often get confused as to whether it's pronounced like ziggy or sidgi, which I really don't understand - for the record it's a German name and closer to the former). It also happened to be a shortening of both a masculine and a feminine name (Siegfried and Sieglinde) which fit the agender/non-binary mold as a little bonus.

However, for basically the entire time I've been going by Sigi I've also socially been going by Bunny. It took a few years of being called both for me to realize that Bunny is the name I prefer. So in the last two or so years I've been work-shopping a bunch of different variations on my name to include Bunny in my name. I've realized that introducing myself as Bunny and pushing people socially towards that name seems to resolve a lot of it, so I might just make that my last name. But I also like the idea of being more playful with my name, and breaking the mold of names by naming myself something like "Bunny Bun Bun" because the idea of challenging norms even in my name is a really fun space that I enjoy. I also just find it really amusing because I'm on a few papers and regularly get published and having a silly legal name means there will be hard science with a silly name on it.

The Allusionist podcast had some good episodes on names and name changing:

https://www.theallusionist.org/name-therapy

https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/name-changers

I loved the "mostly vibes" response from @em-dash. To add something that I don't think anyone else mentioned (amongst a lot of wonderful comments): I was lucky enough to be able to trial a few names out with my partner before any wider reveal or implementation. This exercise was worthwhile because I guess you mostly hear other people saying it. There were a few names I came up with that looked good on paper but just didn't suit me when said aloud.

I was also influenced by wanting a balance between something that wasn't too cutesy and something that people could not interpret as a masc name (though it still somehow happens occasionally ?😂?😂?)