Hey girls! I recently started my social transition, and i’ve been thinking about names. I know not everyone uses a different name during/after their transition, but i think i want to. How did you find your name, and how did you know it was the right one?
My siblings and i were all given names that start with the letter E, and i would like to maintain that pattern. The first name that came to mind was “Eva” after “Queen Iva” from the anime One Piece, who is a character with the power to control hormones.
Seeing Queen Iva was one of the things that made me start to question my gender, so i like the idea of honoring that. However i feel a little wierd about picking my name based on a tv show. Is that something people do? I’ve looked at various lists of baby names, but nothing really clicks the same way as Eva.
Id love to hear your advice and experiences!
CW: Family
CW because some people have a hard time hearing about supportive families.
Before I was born there was a brief period where my parents were expecting me to be a girl, before being “corrected” by later ultrasounds. So they decided on a name, even before deciding on my later deadname. At some point they mentioned that to me, so later when my egg cracked I kind of already knew that there was a name for me, and I took that.
Same. Although they had to have 2 names prepared because I hid my genitals on the ultrasound until the very end 😅
Heck yeah, chiming in with the “parents had two names picked out” backstory. I like to tell people my mom picked my name, we just needed a little redo to correct it to the right one!
Basically the same here, albeit with some slight tweaking to the fem name to avoid having to constantly correct pronounciation like my version 1 name.
Kind of the same for me also, but I couldn’t take the female name they had planned for me since they gave it to my sister. All of my cousins are women on my mom’s side, so my parents were extremely surprised when they found out my sex, since my mom didn’t think it was possible for her to have a boy, but it turned out that she was right all along.
It came to me and it felt right.
Now I’m trying to figure out middle and last names.
my family has gendered last names so I’m using my sister’s last name instead of my legal last name. They’re similar but have different endings.
I tried to find names with ties to my old name or personal significance, but none of them felt right. So I looked through a list of names online, and my name jumped out at me.
If your name feels right, then it’s right :)
Interesting, I always assumed your name had a connection to Ada Lovelace!
Well, having her as a namesake is pretty amazing, but she’s not the reason :)
However i feel a little wierd about picking my name based on a tv show.
Most parents do it for their kids too anyway, and trans people all over pick names from their favorite videogame all the time! Just pick whatever feels right for you.
Well first I picked Ada, from Ada Lovelace, the first programmer, since I enjoy coding.
But then I thought about how my name was based on the one from my grandpa and I felt it was disrespectful towards my family to simply drop it for whatever I fancied. Unfortunately I disliked all the female versions of that name for various reasons.
So I asked my mom what names they came up with before I was born. Lo and behold they had already picked a female name for me! It was uncommon to know the gender before birth back then and so they had already sent it around on my birthcard together with my now dead name.
And well, it was an instant match for me. My dad seemed bummed though because I think my mom picked it and he the male name, but honestly he should lighten up a bit. After all, I didn’t go with Ada.
Eva is a lovely name.
Names are beyond difficult. All my life I had dreamed of having a few names in particular but over the years I have met people with those names. I now associate the names with those people for better or worse. They feel off limits because I would likely compare myself to those women.
In the end I grabbed a ton of names from a bunch of online baby books, threw them into a spreadsheet, and started sorting. The first cut was just names I liked, and then I kept refining those that made the cut. Having hard rules can help too eg: no andro names, something that can be shortened, common trans names, etc
If nothing clicks this can at least help you understand patterns of names you like that you can research more.
Another person who picked theirs from a video game. Pick the name you want to give yourself. Don’t worry about what other people think and focus on if it makes YOU happy.
At some point in high school, before I was even considering that I might be trans, I just thought about how it was a cute name. It stuck in my head for a reason I couldn’t figure out for like 4 years after that, until the reason slapped itself in my face and I started transitioning.
I wish reason would slap me in my face
I just spoke to my parents about it and apparently they would have named me Emily anyway lol
For my first name I went through every name list I could find. Trendy names, classic names, unique names, fantasy names, thousands upon thousands of names… I spent around a week of dedicated browsing and as I read them one by one, if I liked it, I’d try and picture my friends calling me by that. There were a couple that I liked but only one out of all of them felt right, so I went with that. My middle name was a split decision between a couple of the first names I liked, but I liked them differently as middle names so that was also a pretty easy decision once I heard them out loud after my first name. My new last name is a mix of a unique name and foreign word that I liked and also liked how they fit together. No regrets :D
A friend of mine on VRChat picked it out for me and it just sort of “stuck”. They wanted to call me a nice girly name instead of my vrchat username (which is different from my lemmy account name). So they started calling me “Allie”.
So now I go by “Allie” lol. It’s very close to Alex as well. But I have been debating on changing it legally to Allison and then using “Allie” as a nickname.
My mom suggested it. I thought it was the most stupid name suggestion so far, but smiled and nodded because I was happy that we were having a genuine talk about my transition without the negativity that we would often end up with.
After a few months I realized that I kinda love it and, as you say, nothing really clicked the same way. It’s been about 2 years since I legally changed it and I still get a warm feeling when people use it :)
Also, nothing weird about the name Eva! If it feels weird to tell people how you came up with it, you are allowed to not mention that the idea came from a TV show.
The Queen died, and I liked her sense of formal fashion, so I decided to take her name. There’s plenty of people named after the Queen.
I just wanted a name that works in both my native languages, ideally english too, without being butchered by local accents and dialiects. That narrowed it down a lot. Thankfully that small selection had a name I really like, and cheekily signing an email with it just to see how it feels reinforced my choice^^
Also, if the name Eva just clicks for you, that’s great :D It’s a lovely name on its own, and your lore behind it is the cherry on top, making that choice a million times cooler^^
Searched the internet for cute names and picked the first that I liked, which was Luna.
I don’t remember how I got Chloe and I think I’m actively gaslighting myself while writing this comment to think it was at a time when I was unsure about Luna after using that for a while so I searched for names again.
I picked a new full name, meaning that, in addition to me changing the given portion (first and middle), I changed my last name as well.
As the screen name shows, my first name is Angel, and my middle name is Jamie.
I picked Angel not out of any particular funny story. Even before I realized I was trans, I had resentment to the name I was given at birth, and I wanted to pick one I’d rather be called in more casual instances. Just out of nowhere, on a whim, my mind comes up with “Angel”, admiring it in how it sounds, looks, and what it feels like when it is applied to me as a name. I requested my friends to start calling me that in school, and I introduced myself as such wherever applicable. When teachers called my legal name in attendance, I’d just kindly let them know “I go by Angel as a nickname. Thanks.”, and people got pretty damn used to it. The only real goofy thing about the name for me is that I’ve always been very uncomfortable with religion due to being raised in a really strict Catholic household, but that wasn’t really some kind of intentional irony for the lulz. I just love the way the name sounds.
When I was around 17, I accepted myself as trans, but I was under the impression that I was a binary trans woman initially, so I set on changing my name to “Angela”. This was, however, because I knew very little about non-binary people and didn’t think the term could be applicable to me. Once I got to a point of being further educated on enbies, I started identifying as non-binary around the age of 20 and subsequently went back to Angel to have a name that came off as more neutral.
I ended up picking my middle name a bit afterwards though. When I thought I was a binary trans woman, the plan was to name myself “Angela Jacqueline” as my first and middle, and I was going to keep my birth surname as well. I decided that Jacqueline was too feminine for it to be suitable as a middle name when it came to the kind of gendering I desired, but I wanted to keep the initials of “A. J.” because, at that point, people in my friend circles usually either called me “Angel” or simply “A. J.”, as I wasn’t fond of going by Angela because I didn’t have a feminine presentation at the time.
I thought of merely condensing it down to Jackie to make it more neutral, but it didn’t stick too well for me, so I went with Jamie instead which made etymological sense because Jacqueline technically, by origin of the name in meaning, serves as a feminine version of James whereas I saw Jamie as the neutral counterpart of those two.
As far as the surname goes, I decided to change that once I got a clear idea that I had to distance myself from my blood relatives who effectively disowned me. Not only that, but the surname I was born with is really foreign and hard to pronounce for a lot of legal and professional administrations, and I also wanted to give a sense of spicy individuality to my whole name, having all three pieces of it represent me and no one else I’m tied to in particular.
After thinking everything through, I picked a new surname that starts with a J, which I found fitting because of how used I got to being called “A. J.” at times. In order to still keep somewhat of a cultural connection, I picked a surname that is still very common in the native country of my folks. The surname itself can also be a first name, but it usually serves as a diminutive of longer names rather than a legal name on its own. As a diminutive, it is typically seen as gender-neutral though, and it’s also a name I absolutely am in love with, but I didn’t want to have it in the given name slot because, legally speaking, it’s pretty much entirely masculine (it’s really only gender-neutral as a diminutive), so after checking all these boxes:
☑ 1. It starts with a J.
☑ 2. It’s common as a surname in my parent’s native country.
☑ 3. It’s a gender-neutral name that I love to the point of having considered it as a given name.
☑ 4. It’s mostly masculine when it is a legal given name, but fortunately and with point #2 considered, I was able to circumvent any worries about this by putting it in the slot of my surname, as surnames are typically not gendered.
☑ 5. It just sounds damn good!
The idea is that I really don’t have a given [first and middle] and a surname [last] portion anymore. I now just see myself as having three given names that were given to me from none other than myself, but no one else would interpret it that way legally speaking, so it all worked out in the end.
Also, I’m a musician, and in my stage presence, I typically am known by my full name [first, middle, and last] entirely, in a Maynard James Keenan kind of fashion. Haha!
