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 looked up “plant names for people”
I chose my name when I was 12. I don’t remember exactly, but I hit on the name Audrey and I was like, “I really like that name”. Even back then in the year 2000, I knew I was trans, and so I decided to take the name for time being. It kinda stuck after years and years of being my true name. Unfortunately, I did not come out to anyone for over 20 years, so the only one who knew my name was Audrey was, well, me.
It’s a gender-neutral variation of my birth name. I’m a simple person.
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.
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
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
