For anyone here who has chosen your own name, what was that process like?

What factors did you consider? Did you go based on meaning, aesthetics, vibes? Something else entirely? A mix of all of the above?

Was it an easy decision? A difficult one? How long did it take you to decide? I’d love to hear your story.

I’m not mulling over the decision myself or anything — I’m just curious about the process and would love to know more.

The question is open to anything that anyone wants to share about changing one’s name (e.g. social, familial, or legal proceedings), but in particular I’m most interested in what the personal process of deciding on a particular name was like for you. Was there one that just “clicked”? Did you try out different names until you found one that fit? Did you choose the name based on meaning, aesthetics, association, or something else entirely? How did it feel to change your own name in your own head? How did it feel when others started using it to refer to you? What do you like most about the name you chose?

Also, I don’t want to pressure anyone to share their name since that is very identifying information, so feel free to share details of your experience without sharing your name itself — unless that’s something you’re comfortable with putting online here.

... exactly the same as the old name.

Yep, "lgbt" won the vote from this thread. That may not be a surprise to many people, but this has still been a worthwhile process to go through. There were some concerns expressed about the name, and it was only fair that we gave everyone a chance to have a say.

Of course, not everyone will be happy with this outcome. I saw a variety of voting responses which made that clear. At one extreme, I saw a couple of responses with "lgbt" marked as #1, and all other names marked as #N/A. At the other extreme, I saw a couple of responses with the other seven names ranked from #1 to #7, and "lgbt" marked as #N/A. Someone else marked any name which even included as "lgbt" as #N/A. So, there are definitely strong opinions for and against "lgbt".

But the vote was convincing. Nearly half of all people (43 out of 87) put "lgbt" as their first choice, two-thirds of people had it as their 1st or 2nd choice, and more than three-quarters of people had it as their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice. As I checked the results occasionally throughout the period of voting, "lgbt" consistently had about 50% of the first choices. And, counting all the ranked votes, "lgbt" got a final score of 6.98 out of a theoretical maximum of 8. The next closest names - "lgbtq" and "lgbtplus" - were scored at about 5.5 out of 8.

Here is the published result on Survey Monkey, and a screenshot of the detailed count.

There has been occasional concern about the name of this group: ~lgbt. Some people believe it's not inclusive enough, some people think it's a bit clinical, some people think it's not expressive enough, and so on. Nothing major, just minor concerns here and there.

However, Deimos has said he'll rename this group if we want to.

So I'm here to find out what we might want to change the name to.

This will be a two-step process. This thread is for gathering suggestions, and discussing the pros and cons of the various suggestions. After I've collected a list of everyone's suggestions, I'll then post a second thread with a survey in it, for us all to vote on those suggestions.

But, for now... what do you think this group should be called? (And it's okay if you think it should be called ~lgbt!)

The current list of suggestions:

• ~lgbt
• ~lgbtq
• ~lgbti
• ~lgbtiq
• lgbt+ [not usable for technical reasons]
• ~lgbtplus
• ~gsm
• ~queer
• ~rainbow