change

Names in transition

I feel like I’m in such a weird place of flux and transition with my name right now. It has been a long time, so long that I can’t even remember when I last felt a strong connection with my birth name. I’m not averse to it and it doesn’t feel like a “dead name” that brings up bad memories or feelings. I just feel apathetic to it. As in it’s something you can use to identify me but the name isn’t the same as who I am.

When I got married last year I changed my last name to something that my partner and I created together based on our matriarchal heritages. And that feels meaningful in a special way. I also decided to take the opportunity while I was doing all the paperwork to change my legal middle name to the name I have thought for years would be a good fit for me. Something mostly gender neutral but feminine leaning.

The last few weeks I’ve switched to using the chosen name as my primary name in most of my social circles and my friends and partners have been amazing about picking it up consistently and quickly. But I’m still using my first name at work. And it’s creating this odd dissonance for my brain.

I told my boss about it and she is very supportive and really loves my new name. But I haven’t rolled it out to my team yet because it feels so complicated to educate everyone and change it on all the various documents and systems. Not to mention feeling like a burden for being confusing. My strategy was going to be to wait until I got a new position because I was interviewing this month for a job within the company I found out I didn’t get. So now I’m not sure if I should keep waiting and hope I switch jobs soon or if I should just go ahead and tell my team and do the work of educating and updating now.

Being in transition is such an odd experience.

Queer Choir and name change

A few weeks ago a fellow enby told me that the former associate director of the gay men’s and women’s choruses in town was starting an all gender, queer-focused choir. This is literally a dream come true for me. Some of you may recall that a year and a half ago I tried to start my own choral group for trans voices because I was so frustrated with the lack of options in town that weren’t either too binary or too heteronormative. I forgot to do a follow up post here but basically while I found lots of people who were initially interested, I didn’t have enough musical talent to train them and not enough people auditioned to make it work.

So I’ve been waiting either for the right people/time to try again or for someone else to start something so I could join. And it finally happened! Someone else had the same vision and was much better connected than I am so she managed to not only get 80 people to audition but got a well known and very talented artistic director on board.

Last night was our first rehearsal and it felt so good to be singing again after a 3 year break. And what was even better was being part of a bass section with several other nonbinary people as well as trans people from both directions. The tenor section was half women too which was super fun to hear. I got several of my friends to join and I’ve already started making new friends.

I realized about halfway through the rehearsal that this is my opportunity to try out my new name in earnest. I switched my middle name to my chosen gender neutral/femme leaning name last year and I have been trying it out at home and among close friends tentatively the last couple weeks. But here I have a chance at a new start with a group where the only people who know me are fellow trans people and it is by design mostly (if not all) queer and very inclusive. I did have to do some explaining to some people who met me at auditions or when I first came in the door but people were very understanding.

So double excitement! A chance for a fresh start and new name context as well as the choir I’ve always dreamed of! The first rehearsal went so much better than I expected and we sound amazing. There’s about 70 people and everyone is equally enthusiastic. I can’t wait to hear how we sound by our concert in Dec.

What’s in a name?

For a lot of trans people, changing their name is a really big and meaningful step. But for me, I have a hard time figuring out exactly how I feel about the idea of changing my name. Some days I feel apathetic about it and others I feel conflicted. Never once have I felt strongly that I should either keep my name or change it. So for now I take the easiest path which is keeping my first name, although I did change my middle and last names when I got married which was a much bigger paperwork ordeal than I thought. I changed my middle name to something gender neutral so that if I decide to change, I can just go by that name.

The part of me that wants to change it is driven by the idea that people would make less assumptions about me if I didn’t have a male-gendered name. But realistically I know that people make those assumptions regardless based on my voice and appearance. The other reason to change is because of the religious baggage associated with my name. The cult I grew up in treated your name like it was your destiny and when you met the leader, he would tell you the meaning in a very creepy way. All the children in our family had biblical names because of that background. And this month I had a difficult conversation with my dad where he made it clear he would never use a different name for me because this one was “god ordained” and that’s always who I’ll be. And while I had no plans to change my name before that, my first instinct is to say “well if you’re going to shove your “gift” down my throat, then I will reject it.”

The reason I haven’t done that yet is because I have seen how difficult it is for my trans friends to have their new name respected outside our own community. Trying to get coworkers and old acquaintances to switch sounds overwhelming to me and I know it would just increase tensions with my parents when I am still just trying to get them to use my pronouns. I wish I had the courage to be more assertive about these things but right now I am so tired of fighting.

As much as I want to start using my gender neutral middle name with my chosen family and friends, I am also afraid of getting used to it. And more importantly, I don’t feel any stronger a connection with my new name than my old one. To some degree, the name isn’t important to me, at least relative to my pronouns. Is it normal to never feel an emotional connection to your name?