Everyone was surprised at the beginning of my transition when I opted to keep my name. The right to change how you’re known is one of those headline issues. The right to have the state recognise who you are and to respect the autonomy of the individual. The discourse around deadnames and chosen names will continue to be a battleground both in legislation but also in the way people choose to validate or attack trans individuals. It’d be easy to rattle off all the chosen name examples that are perfectly normalised in the world. The artists with stage names, people who go their entire life by a nickname, hell, even my ex-wife discovered that due to an administrative error as a child she had been living by her middle name as her first and her first as her middle.
But this isn’t about reasons like that. This is about my family.
My family is large. My mother is one of five and my father is one of six. Each of them had minimum two kids so in the generation of cousins there are… well there are a lot of us. The family curse (one of many) is the inability to remember names. I’ve grown up having to respond to my brother’s name as much as responding to my own. At family gatherings someone will call out the name of a cousin and I’ll respond as they’re just as likely to be speaking to me. It usually looks like: “Ross…. I mean Darren… Sorry… Seán… Bloody hell Fred! C’mere!” The ‘Fred’ thrown in at the end with a self-deprecating eye roll at how incapable we are at getting names right.
No one in our family is named ‘Fred’.
And it’s fine. Human beings often have moments where their mouth makes a noise and their brain is not engaged. My entire life I’ve been called the wrong name, not because it’s an act of violence being perpetrated against me, or an act of invalidating my identity… but because someone simply got my name wrong. It is so commonplace in my family that it’s a joke that unites us.
So what would happen if I changed my name? I’d still get called my brother’s name, ‘Ross’. I’d still get called ‘Darren’ for my cousin. And yes, I would still get called ‘Seán’. But then they wouldn’t catch themselves and call me ‘Fred’… they would call me by my chosen name. It wouldn’t be a self-deprecating roll of the eye to acknowledge how scatter-brained we all can be, it would be a look of guilt and shame for doing something that could be considered a microaggression. Of course that’s not what it would be at all.
And after this happens a few times what then? The new pathways formed in their minds are not to remember my name, but instead they’re for not saying the wrong name. So maybe the only way to be safe is to not say my name at all? The aunt that, rather than calling out your name from the kitchen, instead just addresses the house that “The tea up!” Or worse, just refers in general to groups of siblings and cousins so as to not say the wrong thing for my sake.
Why would I want to do that to my mother? Or my aunts and uncles, my cousins? They are kind and accepting people and I’m lucky that this is the family that I grew up in. I’m not suggesting that trans people not change their names. I am saying that despite all my strength in other aspects of this journey, I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to look in their eyes and see the joke that unites us turn into shame.
This is all well and good but ultimately, my name is my name. There are other names I love and if I HAD to change it would be easy. I’ve always loved the name ‘Francis’. I love how it sits in an inbetween space for gender identity (which Seán does as well apparently). Sometimes I think about names like ‘Cynthia’ and how delighted I’d be to be known by something so ridiculous. Other times I think maybe I should just lean in and change my name to ‘CindyNightmare’… that’d be great. But this name feels like me. I’m lucky that I’ve never felt the need to destroy who I am in order to become something new. Seán continues to exist, they’re right here. I know for some folks going through this process is more akin to going into witness protection than what I’ve experienced. Sometimes people need to cut that cord to have the chance to live and breathe untethered to the past and the expectations that have been put upon them. But not me. I live in a community of people who can accept that we change.
We all change.
Sadly, for some it takes something extreme. Tear up the photos and burn the clothes. But not every transition is the same. I wish that keeping your name like I have was much more common. I wish that less people felt like they could only be their true selves by killing off who they were.
– S