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I feel like the question, “what’s your name mean to you” is kind of more about what your identity means to you and it’s a very loaded and…
Baires is my legal last name right now, I got it from my dad. I don’t really feel connected to him so I should be feeling a disconnect…
I had my first sort of name change before I was out. Starting when I was a kid, and for a long time afterwards, I’d gone by a…
I had a whole slew of boy names picked out between the ages of about three and eight years old. They were names I was familiar with at…
My very first discovery of my womanhood was in 1957, when I was a child living in Baltimore. I had a friend named Rosemary, and I wanted to…
I resonate very deeply with my father, Michael McLarin’s, energy, so for a while I wanted to make Michael my name. I didn’t get to know him well—he…
When I was 14 and thinking about transitioning, one of the names that came to my mind was Allison. I thought about Allison for a while, but as…
When I was 12, I knew there was something different. In the 80’s, very few of us knew about transgender people—but I knew I identified as a boy….
Before I understood exactly who I was, I was given the name Vann by people who were close to me. They called me Vann because there was another…
Before I came out as trans, I presented as a very masculine lesbian. People sometimes called me Shane, because I had the same vibe and haircut as Shane…
At 13 and a half years old, Bradley started exhibiting drastic changes in behavior and physical appearance. He also had an abrupt, severe episode of depression. We’d had…
I was watching the TV show The Middle one day, and there was a character named Brad who I felt embodied my spirit animal. Earlier in my transition,…
One of the only things my biological parents did right was to name me Tyler and to name my sister Jamie. Jamie is nine years older than I…
When I was first coming out in the late 80’s, there definitely was not much in the way of trans awareness, even within the gay and lesbian community….
The name Merrick is Welsh for Lord of the Sea. I am Nichiren Buddhist. Our mantra, which is called the daimoku, is Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Our sect’s founder, Nichiren…
In the late 80’s or early 90’s, I watched a horror movie in which Grace Jones played the lead role, as a vampire named Katrina. I said, “Oh…
When I was 19 or 20, I started going by a name that was close to my birth name, but more gender-ambiguous. I could get away with it;…
At the beginning of my transition, I had the nickname Honeycomb, because I always ate the cereal. It followed me everywhere. I was happy going by that name,…
I liked the name Angela because growing up, I would always draw pictures of angels for my mom; they were the one feminine memory about my pre-transition self….
The name Leigh was traditionally male, until it recently gained popularity as the female spelling of Lee—the female spelling of a gender-neutral name. I like how that experience…