Transition Through Names

Preamble: I started out with the goal of this post being about finding my name, but I quickly realized how much my name journey was very intertwined with my early transition journey in general, so it expanded somewhat in scope. Relatedly, this post took me around a year to finish, in large parts as it stirred up so many emotions.

Content warning: Discussion of gender dysphoria and gender imposter syndrome.

Intro

My relationship with names is simple and complicated. For other people, I find it fundamentally easy: You tell me your name, and that’s your name. I’m bad at remembering names, but that’s just memory - not lack of acceptance, and it is just as much of a problem with people who haven’t changed their name. If the traditional gender association for your name does not fully match your current gender presentation, that is no problem. It may “confuse” my brain for a bit initially, but that’s just a transition phase. Since I’m bad at remembering names, that usefully also means I’m also terrible at remembering deadnames, meaning it’s easier just to use the new name.

When it comes to myself, one would hope it would also be marginally easy, right? Nope - the exact opposite - mostly.

Table of Content

Sidequest: My brain and I

To discuss this more, we unfortunately need to take a short detour regarding identity and terminology. My brain and I are different but related entities (I also generally classify my body as a third entity, but that’s irrelevant for this post). “I” am my conscious self, which I control, whereas “my brain” is my subconscious, which I mostly don’t control, and the physical entity which frequently keeps overloading. I have heard other autistic people talk about a similar distinction. There probably are nice and specific terms for this kind of identity concept, but I don’t know them, and I won’t look them up now because if I do that, I will become even more derailed from writing this :-). This topic alone probably deserves a brain dump/blog post, but not right now.

The difference between my brain and I is important because much of my gender identity comes from my brain. And my brain is even worse at communicating what it likes than I am! There is a reason I think brains are stupid! What I mean by my brain being bad at communicating is that it frequently only gives very vague signals about what it likes and dislikes.

Gender neutral name

Coming back to names - I have never felt a particularly strong connection to my birth-given name. It wasn’t that I disliked it for most of my life, but it just was. One example is that I never particularly cared how it was pronounced. The language I grew up with pronounced my name in one way, which was the normal pronunciation there, but when I started using it in person in English, without much thought, I changed the pronunciation to be more similar to what English speakers would expect. I don’t remember it being anything I particularly thought about - it was simpler, and I genuinely did not care.

More recently, for quite a while, I haven’t liked my given name. It wasn’t a strong dislike, just a mild unease whenever it was used, especially when I saw it written. The signal from my brain was weak enough that I had a decent amount of wondering if I disliked my name or if I wanted to dislike it (since I “wanted to be trans…”). I was reasonably sure it was real, especially since I started noticing how many places my name was used. I had never noticed how many automated emails included “Hi, FIRSTNAME”, but I started noticing and getting annoyed with them. I frequently felt that including my name on those occasions seemed entirely unnecessary.

With the unease with my given name slowly growing, I was pondering a new name. I have been enough in trans spaces that “you can just choose a name” was already a pretty ingrained thing. The problem was “choosing” a name I, or really my brain, liked. During this period, the primary gender identity I felt fit me was purely non-binary, but even more so, not legacy gender¹. Therefore, I was looking for a gender-neutral name. This went on for probably around a year, where I, on and off, looked at baby name sites to try and find one I liked. During much of this period, I also suffered from burnout, so it wasn’t a quick search. I found a few I liked, but none really “clicked”. A gender-neutral name is nice because it doesn’t set any expectations for gender presentation. At this point, I hadn’t really thought about changing my gender presentation, and a gender-neutral name didn’t really “require” this.

A very much not gender-neutral name…

One day, while watching a video, my brain suddenly said, “I like that name” from one of the people in the video. The “quirk”—that name was Samantha, not the gender-neutral Sam, but Samantha, which is decidedly on the feminine side and not gender-neutral. When this happened, I was still looking for a gender-neutral name.

That was the kickoff for serious consideration that I might be transfem. My brain communicated my gender identity to me through my name. I remember talking to my therapist, who I absolutely love, saying that I found a name which was decidedly not gender-neutral. It took a week or two before I dared to say what it was.

It’s more than a year later, and I have been using Samantha online since then, especially on Mastodon/social media. I feel fully comfortable with that and much prefer it over my deadname, even though I still feel some disconnect. Is that really me? I had been using my old name for over 40 years, so it makes sense that things take time to get used to such a change. At the same time, I certainly feel “non-negative noticeable emotions” when somebody explicitly uses Samantha to refer to me, and I never had any of the uneasy feelings, weak or not, that I have when I’m being referred to as my dead name. One case where I have noticed a bit more explicitly positive emotions is when ordering from a small business (think Etsy, etc.) where the seller has handwritten the card in a “pretty way” with colours, etc. Alexithymia is absolutely a thing for me, hence the vague description of emotions.

Sidequest: Gender Dysphoria

We need to go on another short side quest, this time about gender dysphoria.

I get increasingly strong dysphoria about seeing my face. Most of the time, I don’t see my face, but I see my hands with red-painted fingernails, rings, bracelets, etc., which are either gender-affirming or, at worst, neutral. But then there are mirrors or video conferencing, etc., which blast your face, which doesn’t seem like you, back at you.

I think one of the core problems with seeing my face is that I get severe imposter syndrome. Do I require a certain gender presentation from other people? Not really - from me, it seems the answer is at least somewhat yes.

From the The Gender Dysphoria Bible:

Depersonalization is a disconnect from your own body: an inability to believe that the person you see in the mirror is actually yourself.

When I first read this part of The Gender Dysphoria Bible, it really hit me that I had been unconsciously avoiding mirrors for a long time. Now, I’m conscious that I avoid them, but they are, unfortunately, hard to avoid all the time. Relatedly, I was recently wondering how people, using manual razors and shaving cream, avoided getting shaving cream all over the place when shaving their face - then it suddenly hit me, I shave without a mirror and just feel instead, which probably is a significant factor in this.

Hopefully, gender-affirming care (especially HRT) will, over time, help with the dysphoria…

As a side note, this section, while in draft for a long time, started with While I don’t feel or notice gender dysphoria most of the time - unfortunately, I had to remove that, as it’s no longer true.

Gender Dysphoria and name

The part where it gets a lot harder is using my new name where people can see me. Because all my imposter syndrome and gender dysphoria kick in when I can see my own face, my brain automatically assumes the same will be the case for other people.

The result is that while I very quickly felt comfortable using my name online where my avatar is a Red Panda, using it/asking people to use it in person is much, much harder. I don’t think this has gotten easier over time; my discomfort with my deadname just increased enough that, on the balance, asking people to use Samantha was better.

Changing name at work

One primary example of the gender presentation vs. name challenge is that it took me about a year to change my name at work. My employer is trans-supportive, and we also already have another trans person on my team, so I was pretty confident that there would be no problems with coming out and changing my name. When I finally was at a point where I felt ready enough to write my coming out email, I started thinking through the consequences, especially that I wouldn’t be changing my name just for my team but for everyone I interacted with. That meant for all cases of in-person or video conferencing, I would, to some degree, need to come out, at the very least implicitly, by gender presentation only partly matching my name’s typical gender presentation expectations. While most of my interactions are with my direct team, I teach new people every few months, so that’s a virtual room full of people I don’t know. That caused severe anxiety with my brain just saying NO and pushing through it felt like it would be a bad idea. I ended up waiting two months before I felt ready to come out.

It’s now been around nine months since I came out at work, and as “logically expected”, it has gone very well. As confirmation that this is the right path, now when I see “Hi, Samantha” from an automated system or a person, it feels positive and affirming. For in-person/video conferencing, I feel a bit of imposter syndrome when people use my name. Hopefully, it will get better over time.

Not too long after I had changed my name at work, I taught a class for new people, in which I introduced myself as Samantha, and it went perfectly fine, even if it was a bit stressful. I had conveniently forgotten about the “problem” with my name until shortly before the presentation, so I didn’t have time to think too much about it in advance.

Samantha Rose

When I first started interacting with people online 30 years ago, I used my full “legal” name; it just didn’t really occur to me to do something else, and it was the norm in the communities I was in.

Since starting my transition for privacy/safety reasons, I stopped doing that, but finding the name Samantha was a lot of work, so also finding a nickname, etc., wasn’t feasible, so I used “Samantha” online. An important point of using Samantha online and being referred to as Samantha was part of my gender exploration, so a nickname would not have worked for this goal. While using Samantha is perfectly fine, the issue is that it’s less unique, so it makes it harder for people to “recognize” me across social media platforms, etc. Therefore, I considered using a sort of online second name in place of my surname.

While I hadn’t spent much time on this compared to Samantha, I did look around a bit - but similarly to Samantha, it mostly just came out of the blue one day: “Oh, I like that name”. That name was Rose, or more specifically, it was used as Samantha Rose. I wasn’t looking for an explicitly feminine name, but Rose was what my brain liked, and while there is no objective classification of more or less feminine names, to me, it really feels in the very feminine end of names.

Being Samantha

While my brain’s reactions to most day-to-day experiences relating to my gender are very subtle, changing my name has, without a doubt, been a positive improvement.

In the small end, for example, automated mail from shops, mailing lists, etc., I went from a small but consistent mild annoyance when I saw my deadname to a neutral or, at times, positive reaction to seeing “Hi Samantha,” etc.

As of this writing, I have now been using Samantha for 9 months at work, and as expected, it has gone really well. There have been very few cases of deadnaming, and those were genuine mistakes by the people I talk the most with and have known for many years, which I think makes sense as it probably takes them a bit longer to fully remember to switch. A strange, but not really strange, effect of co-workers being good at using my name without issue is that when using video conferences where people can see me, I start feeling imposter syndrome when people use my name. Did I mention brains are stupid?

While in most cases where I see Samantha being used for me, my brain’s reaction is very mild or neutral, sometimes it’s very noticeable. For example, having online friends in the autistic Mastodon community go out of their way to use my name certainly gives me many emotions, even if Alexithymia means I find it hard to describe it other than “strong non-negative emotions”.

I still don’t feel an extremely strong connection to Samantha or Samantha Rose, but as mentioned I also never felt a very strong connection to my deadname. My brain is subtle and moves very slowly and the imposter syndrome is there, so this doesn’t change anything.

Not always being Samantha

For new places where I interact with people in person and have to give a name, I have to choose which name to use. Perhaps after all this, it may seem like it should be simple, and I can just use Samantha, but unfortunately, it’s not. For each case, I have to choose which name to use. If I use Samantha, I’m now forced to out myself as trans (as I “don’t look like a Samantha”), which just costs energy regardless of acceptance and energy is in limited supply. Even in accepting environments, I still run into my imposter syndrome, especially with people I don’t already know. I still don’t have a legal ID saying Samantha, so I must consider if that may be a problem for that particular case.

So sometimes, using my deadname for that individual situation may be the less bad option, all things considered.

Having to make that decision again and again is just stressful. Hopefully, This will improve when I get comfortable using Samantha all the time, but it’s an issue for now.

Outro

Writing this took me a long time, primarily because it took a lot of emotional energy - especially the section on dysphoria and its results. I started writing this before I changed my name at work, but when I thought I was about ready to do it. Writing it down helped me realize why my brain objected so unexpectedly strongly to changing my name.

I really want to highlight how incredible and key my autistic Mastodon community has been in my transition and finding my name. I first came out as trans in this community by experimenting with changing my online name to Samantha very early on, and I really can’t overstate how much I appreciate all the support. It has meant more than I can ever express 💜💜💜.

Footnotes