Names

As a transgender male, choosing a name that fits perfectly with yourself is something that I feel is one of the most important things in transitioning. It’s one of the first things people get to know about you when you meet them.

Seems easy enough, right?

Wrong.

No.

Absolutely not.

Maybe it is if you’re not me.

But as for myself, it’s been a mess. My parents have told me that the reason why they still call me my birth name is because they spent so long trying to decide on the perfect name for me. I never used to understand that, it’s just a name, right?

Wrong again.

There’s so much behind a name. Why did you choose one over another? Does it sound okay? Are you comfortable with hearing it all the time? Apparently according to other people, “Why is your name [insert name], you don’t look like a [name].”

Sure, I don’t look like it (and my first and last name both start with the same letter just to annoy me) but I also don’t exactly look like a guy yet either, so there’s no way I could look like whatever name I’ve chosen anyway.

I chose the name because I feel like it. It felt right for me, so I kept it. That is, I kept this one, after the five other ones from before. (I told you it was a mess.)

Something that sounds good to me one day might annoy the hell out of me the next, and that’s how I ended up with six names in the past five months or so.

I also didn’t fully understand the stress of having to tell everyone every time I felt like my name wasn’t working. It’s difficult enough to come out once to a person, much less six times, especially if they’re trying to get used to a name. My natural inclination to avoid risking annoying people has led to me not correcting them or not coming out at all simply due to my own insecurit about other people, even though I have no idea how they’ll actually respond when I tell them.

In part, this is probably because most of the trans people I know in my social life outside of the internet chose and were happy with a name after maybe one or two, or even their first one. It makes me feel weird to go through so many in my search to be comfortable, since it originally didn’t seem to be that hard.

I’m not usually the type of person who gets upset immediately if someone misgenders me or uses the wrong name, partially because I’m not that kind of person and partially because my own name changing has even driven me a bit crazy. I get that it’s difficult to keep up with, but hey, we’re in this together with trying to figure it out, so I mess up, you mess up, it’s probably okay.

I’ve always heard that names hold a deep meaning to them, but I never realized how damn important it actually was until I had to do it myself. And it is not fun when you only have a partial grasp on who are and want to be as a person.