just interested in hearing peoples stories for how y’all have chosen your new names! doesn’t have to be particularly profound or interesting really, i just like hearing about others experiences.
i’m actually planning on changing my own soon socially despite being cis, and just really like hearing how others came to find their names, as well as am curious about if anyone had to go through more than one to find what’s right for them. i figured this would be the best community to talk about the topic even if i’m not trans :)
I stole my name from my kindergarten girlfriend lol
Based.
LOL that’s a power move honestly
My parents were supportive, so I wanted to include them since in a way I would be taking away that moment that they named their child. I asked my mom for the list of baby girl names she’d had for me and picked my favourite from them. That way she still had chosen my true name and I also got to choose one that fit me very well.
i really like this :) choosing a name for yourself is a really powerful experience, taking control over the word that is you, but if you’re close to your parents, it’s also really unfortunate that you’re taking that away from them in a sense. i’m close with my mom, and she loooooves the name she chose for me- it has a really special story and meaning behind it to her, so it kind of breaks her heart to know that i don’t love it too.
I heard the name as a kid and I always knew it was my name internally. As a kid, I always daydreamt of a pretty girl in an overcast field with the wind blowing against her hair. I decided her name was Leyla. It wasn’t until I came out that I understood that the girl was me, and had always been me.
awwwww :3 i love that image! coming to the realize that that girl is you is so awesome and special too!
I looked up “plant names for people”
Username checks out
I didnt know where to look and didnt have any ideas, so I pulled up the list of most popular girls names from my year of birth. It was number 400 something of 500 lol.
I read it in a bad sci fi book when I was about 14, and it just stuck in my head until I finally came out. Also I like trees and gin.
My friend suggested and I liked it :3
:3 i like it too!
I’m non-binary. My first and last names are fine. First name leans gendered but is technically unisex. I’m in the process of changing my middle name from a generic gendered one to either “Moxie” or “Miles”. This is because
- I don’t want to have to change my initials (smh)
- I feel no affinity towards my middle name
- Miles is best Sonic the Hedgehog character
- Moxie is best soda
- My middle name appears on few documents but my initial appears on many, so fewer things to update.
(Feel free to suggest other less gendered middle names that start with “M” or try to persuade me one way or another)
Michele is a gender-neutral name between Michel, which is masculine, and Michelle, which is feminine.
Funnily enough, my original middle name is Michelle. I’ve spent 30 years not really liking it :)
I was working through a list of nature-related names, looking for an uncommon one that still sounded like a real name. I was almost ready to try out “Ember”, but then I saw “Hazel” and it just clicked. So that’s what I’ve called myself ever since!
I really wanted a name that starts with the letter ‘M’ because it just felt right. I then looked up “nonbinary/genderneutral names that start with the letter M” I found one with a slight association with my deadname
its funny, I go by pixel which I didn’t pick with the intent of it becoming my name but when you’re in gaming spaces for long enough your tag kinda becomes your name, as it were? Like I still use my “real” name in my day-to-day but just about everyone just calls me pixel outside of my family or very very long-time friends, and it’s “weird” enough that it kinda reads as an enby name in the first place lol
I like how the name naturally got attached to you over the years.
Haha me too. it’s funny, I decided to switch to this tag on my 15th birthday which is also coincidentally when I got involved in the gaming spaces I spent the most time in, and also when I kinda started really questioning my gender more aggressively, so going by Pixel let me fit in more and also let me sort of avoid the conversation about gender, because it wasn’t a name, but the more time passed the more it was absolutely a name lmao
pixel is so cool! that’s really interesting that it morphed into what you use in everyday life- do you have irl friends in your gaming group? i’m just curious how it’d break out of an online space like that’s
I have a couple, but not a ton tbh. Most of the long-time friends i was talking about are from school and stuff aren’t friends from online and those are separate groups for the most part, but they dont really bat an eye at it when those groups do overlap for whatever reason. But the friends that I’ve met online I do hang out with in real life frequently and they call me pixel in person, not really a huge issue haha
I stole mine from a videogame way back in highschool, 15 years before I would officially crack.
I played an RPG where the main character just resonated with me greatly. And might have also been the first female lead I’d ever played as. I held into that name as my future daughter’s name, even though I didn’t want kids. So it was an imaginary daughter.
When I came out as trans, I figured that I was that imaginary daughter I had been building in my mind all those years.
i love this
When I cracked to enby/genderfluid, I wanted a name that was genderneutral. I’m a fan of Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead, so I thought Ash(ley) worked well. Later I cracked again to transfeminine and thought “yeah, that still works.”
Ashy Slashy!
I wanted a science-based name because I’m a little nerd lol. I considered Kelvin at some point. In the end, (and I really can’t remember why I specifically chose it) I named myself after Edmond Halley – Hal as a nickname, as a reference to HAL 9000 of course.
Honestly, I sort of regret it, because Halley isn’t as gender neutral as I thought and everyone considers it a girl name. I wish I’d been more out there and straight up decided to call myself Truck or Brick or something.
If you want to be called Truck, then dammit, people will call you Truck.
Also, Brick is a fine name.
aww :( that’s really too bad, i’m sorry to hear it. even with hal? i can see halley being a bit feminine, but hal reads as neutral or masc to me more.
for what it’s worth, i think halley is cool as fuck, and the origins of why you chose it are super sick.
Wow, thank you! <3 Hal is a masculine name (and I pretty much go by it all the time) but if I say my name is Halley, people just tend to assume I’m a girl. I really thought it was a gender neutral name… I’m autistic so I can’t tell as easily as other people lol. I guess my advice is: when you’ve picked your name, ask other people whether it reads as fem or masc! I know you’re cis but it can still be really annoying for people to assume you’re a gender you’re not because of your name.
To be fair, whether a name is considered fem/masc/gn is so arbitary, the same name can be fem to one person and masc to another, even in the same country. So I doubt that non-autistic people have an easier time with it, they’ll probably just assume their own opinion is the prevalent one lol.
Trans guy here. There was no masc version of my deadname, and my parents didn’t have a name picked out for if I’d been AMAB, so those routes were closed to me. I initially tried to pick something where I could keep my initials, but the only names I liked were already “in use” in my social and family circles, and it didn’t feel right.
So I looked at the popularity of my deadname in my birth year, then started from that same rank on the boy name charts for the same year and worked my way out. I found a name of very similar popularity that I really liked, and met my other self-imposed criteria (nickname I liked, no nicknames that I hated, not easily misspelled or confused with a femme name). The benefit of looking at birth year popularity ranks is that I ended up with a name that doesn’t sound “too old” or “too young” for me, which may or may not matter to other people.
My parents did something similar when they named us, so that we’d have names that were recognizable, but we wouldn’t share our name with five other kids in our class. (My mom had a very popular name for her age group and she hated it.)
For my middle name I picked a name I always loved but that I didn’t want for my first name, for practical reasons (easily misspelled, gender neutral, much more popular for younger kids than for my age group). In my area, nobody ever knows your middle name unless you go out of your way to tell them, so I let myself have more fun with it.
It’s been close to a decade and I still love both of them. I “tried it on” with friends for a few months before starting legal paperwork, and I’m glad I did. Some other names I tried out didn’t stick.
that’s so nice you still love them, i’m happy for you! a lot of people have special stories or meanings behind why they chose their names, so it’s nice to see someone else who, similarly to me, just had name lists to go through :) and getting to have something you’d already loved for awhile as your middle name is so sweet, i love that middle names get to be unpractical and just fun since they don’t really matter very much.
