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[cn: trans* topics; and cn: I am currently still questioning whether we are.. a system,.. which is why we avoid some common terminology. This is just how names work(ed) for us, so far]
For a long time there were just a bunch of nick-names flowing around for us.
I had to come up with nick-names for my Online Accounts, because at the time people would never share personal info online. So I used a Name that I just really liked the sound of. But at times I really didn’t feel like the side I showed of myself online was who I felt like, so I started to make more Accounts, in order not to be judged by how I “usually” was at that specific online space….
When I noticed that ‘I’ had a lot of “disagreements with ‘myself'” I usually used two different names to refer to these different ‘sides’. So I had, at the time, 2 names I liked, and the assumption, that I was a third ‘perspective’, with a different (my birth) name.
Fast forward a decade and I went to Uni. I noticed how odd it felt for me when people started calling me by my birth name (that was so rarely used before).
I wanted to change my name in order to figure out whether I might be trans* and I actually also tried to change the names I used only for myself.. but it kinda didn’t really work.
But we did agree about
most names to change them to a gender-neutral one, in order to manage dysphoria. Those were anyhow the names that didn’t quite fit to begin with and we are definitely not at the end of our name(s) finding journey.Currently, for the outside world there are two names: a more “proper” sounding and a more “nickname” sounding one;
One was the only gender-neutral nick name I had when I came out, and so I went by that for a while; the other one was a suggestion from my parent, when I came out to them, as a gender neutral name they could get behind. As a trans* person it is very cool to be able to say that my parent chose my name (again); even though I chose to change it.
Irl, I just react to both of these names when called, but most of the time no name that someone else calls me feels right tbh.In the end I myself usually just use a name that I feel comfortable with that very moment.