Visit theallusionist.org/name-changers to hear this episode and read more about it.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, fashion a pair of wings out of feathers and wax and give them to language with strict instructions for use.
It’s still Name Season here at the Allusionist. In today’s show, we’re going to hear a few of your stories of why you changed your names. Thanks so much to all of you who have been telling me about your names, it is never boring. I think there’ll be another episode of this, so if you want to, do record yourself telling me why you changed your name and why you chose the name you chose.
The people you’ll hear today have included only as much or as little of their current or past names as would be safe to have aired publicly and that they were comfortable with. For instance, where trans correspondents mention their dead names, that was their decision. Some correspondents remain anonymous.
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On with the show.
I changed my name because my parents spelled it wrong.
Why did I change my name? I didn't like it!
I have legally changed my name twice now, first and last. My parents tell this cute story about choosing my name the night before I was born. But as I was growing up, it was one of the most common names for female dogs.
I found out when I was about 12 that I was actually named for an actress that my dad had had a crush on when he was a kid, so I thought that was a bit weird and I didn't really want to hang on to that.
When I was born my parents could not agree on a name for me, and on their last day in the hospital after I was born they were watching the news and there was a missing children's report on the TV with a little girl named Ashleigh, and I was named after her.
Choosing a new name allowed me to drop a lot of the old baggage with the old identity without feeling as though I were betraying it.
When I was a kid I was always asking my parents, "What would you have named me if I'd been a boy?" They always answered, "We just knew you were gonna be a girl." I wonder if they would've given me a real answer if they knew why I was actually asking. If they had ever given me a real answer, that would be my name now. As things stand, I had to choose my own name.
I changed my name because I was coming into a more identification with Japanese heritage. I am half Japanese and half Caucasian, and I felt like my name, my birth name, didn't represent that. In fact, it didn't. All three of my names, first, middle, last. I always stood out on paper, you wouldn't have been able to tell that I was actually half Asian. It looked completely like a generic white name, so to speak. And I think choosing a name and coming into a name that you feel is appropriate for you is a big step in terms of self discovery.
I was Roger. Roger IV. That name always felt weird for me. I eventually realized this is because I'm trans and Roger is a very masculine name. At first I tried to find a name that was a feminine version of it, but none really exist. The closest I got was Regina but I didn't like that either. After years of going by nicknames and little things, I eventually realized I could take part of my name and recycle it. I could take the fourth, and convert it to a Roman numeral, and put it in the center of my name. I got River. And I liked that.
Hi, my name is Remy Green, and I'm an attorney in Brooklyn, New York. I practice law, and I'm barred in the state of New York under the name J - and that's a J as a first initial - Remy Green. I was born as Jeremy Maxwell Green. Jeremy is an obviously masculine name, while Remy is at least somewhat androgynous, which better reflects me as a transgender non binary person. I was told that for practicing law while shortening Jeremy to Remy or Jeremy to a J and using it as an initial would be perfectly okay, switching out the first E in Jeremy for a period and a space would be too unconventional. So Jeremy becoming Remy Green was fine. Jeremy Maxwell Green becoming J. Maxwell Green would have been fine. But Jeremy Green becoming J. Remy Green was not. So after confirming that, in fact, one Jeremy could change to J and one Jeremy could change to Remy, I went to court and got another Jeremy added to my name. I changed my name to Jeremy Jeremy Green.
So I chose to change my name because before I was aware that I'm trans - because I didn't know that was the identity I could be or that we existed really - I always hated the colours of my name. I didn't realize that I experienced letters not like everyone else because I'm also synaesthetic, so I didn't realize I didn't like my name because of gender reasons; I just thought, I just can't stand these colours, these pinks, these teals, I can't handle them. Which is funny because I love those colors now. I just needed to change my name for so long. I knew that it was important that I that I pick a name that has letters that I love and colours that I love, colours that I paint with, colours that resonate with me. So I named myself Ketch, and I spelled it K E T C H because it mattered it was in the darker teals and burnt reds and things that I that I really enjoy looking at all the time. And bonus points: it turned out it worked for my gender expression too.
When my wife and I decided to get married, we wanted to make our own last name, as I've never been too connected to my own. And so what we did is we took the first letter from each of our last names and our mothers' last names and made an acronym out of that in order to make our own last name.
My father desperately wanted a boy to carry on the family name to be a third. Instead he got two girls. When I got divorced at the end of my twenties, the thought of reverting to my maiden name seemed an injustice or an affront to my individuality. So I chose the last name Rowan after a magical and protective tree.
My name is Rowan. I change my name when I was 18. I'm 26 now. And I changed my name because at the time I was really struggling with my gender identity and I felt a lot of dysphoria being called a very feminine name. And I chose the name Rowan when I was researching names for a story; I came across it and I just had this instant sense that was the name I would have been given if I had been born a boy, like it was my name in another life, and I decided that there was no reason to waste it on this other life when you only get one. And that's why I changed it.
Hi, my name is Michelle, formerly Michael, and I changed my name because I was discovering who I was and when I did, I did a transition from male to female so I thought I needed a more female-sounding name. Some people believe that when you become a new person, you need a totally new identity, and with me that's not the case. I wanted to keep sort of the variant of what I was called, I guess you could say, just to pay honour to my parents; they chose that name for me and that name carried me for many years and that was my identity for many years. So I thought to pay homage, as it were, to that identity that when I became who I am today that I would just vary it slightly into more of who I am.
I changed my name about two or three years ago when I came out as a transgender man. My name used to be Rachel and now I go by Felix, partially because I didn't know any Felixes. I like that it means ‘lucky’ in Latin, and that it's the root for the word ‘happy’ in Spanish. I think that's kind of nice. Like the idea is as I changed my name, I'm becoming more happy, that is part of my transition.
My birth name is not a particularly feminine name but it is identifiably a quote unquote girl's name. I am a non-binary person so that wasn't going to work for me, and after I came out it took a while but I decided that I did want to change my name. And I thought about a lot of different names to use; I had a long list and I tried out a couple of different ones. But I settled on Felix, because first of all it means 'lucky' which makes me smile when I think about it. I only know that because of Harry Potter, because the luck potion is called Felix Felices. So that's what I settled on as my reason. Anytime anyone refers to me by my name, it reminds me that I'm really lucky to not just be queer and be out and be in alignment with who I actually am, but also to be surrounded by such a loving community of people who honour and respect who I am and do so by calling me by my name.
I used to be called Righard, which is a South African name and it's quite common in South Africa. But unfortunately, when I moved to the Netherlands, it was really difficult for people to pronounce. When you are meeting new people, which is part of an expat’s life, it is always really frustrating when people spend like the first three minutes of conversation just in a spitting contest to do the G sound, Righard. So I decided to make my life but also their lives easier. And I chose Abraham. And how did I do that? I started with the alphabet and Aaron was already taken, so I just went to the next one, Abraham.
ERIN: My name is Erin Artin.
BEN: And my name is Ben Artin. When I was growing up in Croatia, my name was Miroslav Yurecic.
ERIN: And my name was Yelena Antonic when I was growing up in Serbia. We met when we were both starting grad school in Boston, and pretty soon after we started dating we realized neither of us was loving the experience of having a name that nobody around us could spell or pronounce.
BEN: So we figured: why not change them? The whole thing: new first names, new last names. We decided that our new names would have to be unambiguous, because we were tired of being asked how to spell them.
ERIN: And we wanted our new names to be easily spelled and pronounced in Serbian and Croatian.
BEN: And we wanted them to be short, because if we're going through all this work to pick new names we're going to want to then end up with nicknames.
ERIN: Even with those requirements though, there were still way too many first and last names to pick from.
BEN: So we decided to add one more requirement, that let us quickly turn the list to a manageable size using a computer program.
ERIN: We picked new names that could be spelled with a periodic table of the elements.
BEN: Then we field tested the new names for about a year to see how we liked them. We got dinner reservations using our tentative new names for example.
ERIN: And when we finally legally changed our names, we kept our old first names as our new middle names. Now we can just say “I used to go by my middle name” when we don't feel like telling this whole story.
I had never connected to my birth name of Michael. There were so many of us in grade school that we were all of us addressed by our full names, even by our friends. When I was 12 I told my dad that I didn't like my name very much so he said that I should just find one that I didn't like and have people call me that. So I settled on Cirrus, because I enjoy cloud gazing. I like Latin and all the clouds are named for Latin. It's been professionally very beneficial since it sets me apart in my field as a journalist. There are 66 Michael Woods just in the Bay Area subsection of LinkedIn, but I positively dominate Google search results for Cirrus Wood.
So I'm trans and I wanted to change my name. It was pretty clear that I was going to change my first name just by adding an A to the end of it and feminizing it. But I didn't want to just do the feminized version of my middle name, because my assigned middle name was Ahmed and this is at the time when Ahmadinejad was in the news and Ahmedina did not feel like the name that I wanted to have. And so it took me honestly seven years to figure out the middle name that I actually wanted to have, and I ended up choosing Ruya, for two reasons. One. Is because it is Arabic for ‘vision’ or ‘sight’ and I really like my eyes. I have had various types of dysphoria in my life but at all points I really enjoyed the colour of my eyes. They changed from blue to green to grey and I like how they look, and I have always liked that part of my own body, even when I didn't like any other part.
I chose the name Leaf because I spend a lot of time in the forest and I like foresty things. But I think more importantly as a trans person, or more specifically as a transgender non binary person, I very much felt singled out and lonely. I spent a lot of time feeling like a freak. I'm almost always the only trans person in the room, and even when there are other trans people around I am probably the only transgender non binary person in the room. I chose the name Leaf because there are a lot of leaves out there, and it sounds pretty silly but honestly I really do go out into the forest and be like, "Wow, look at all of these leaves" and just feel like one leaf among many leaves, and it's very very comforting. And I love my name.
My birth name was Amanda Lynn - my middle name was Lynn - after the instrument, the mandolin. And I never really felt like it fit me. And my mom started calling me Amanda Panda when I was a kid. And then it just kind of evolved to where my close friends would start calling me Panda. And then when my wife decided to transition - she is a trans woman and she changed her birth name, her dead name, to her feminine name - I went ahead and changed my name legally to Panda. We did it at the same time in the court together and it was a really nice experience. And I'm glad that I did it.
HZ: Here’s one from someone who needs to remain anonymous. “In my mid-20s I took a job with an organisation that monitors far-right extremist activity. Because of the risks involved, I was advised to pick a false name to work under. I picked a first name that sounded not too unlike my own name - one syllable, ending in the same consonant sound - and a surname from somewhere back in my family tree but that had no particular connotations for me. The aim was for it to be as unmemorable as possible. About 5 years on I moved to a different job but would still be working with lots of the same people, so I just kept the false name. I had it till I left that job, 4 years ago, so for about 15 years in all. It quickly became completely normal to me to have two names. I never once accidentally used the work name in my private life or vice versa, and was perfectly comfortable with it. It probably helped me to compartmentalise things, keeping what was a secretive and sometimes risky job separate from my personal life. My wife actively disliked the pseudonym, I think feeling a really uncomfortable cognitive dissonance over it in a way I never did. The conclusion I draw from all this is that our names may be more closely linked with how others see us than with how we see ourselves.”
I was doxxed, because some people on the internet felt that I shouldn't be in a position of authority on an internet forum. That ruined my name for me. It had been a name that I had always valued and been proud to have. But it ruined it for me. It took it away. I was engaged fairly shortly after with my longtime boyfriend and I made the decision to change my name to his. It was not an easy decision but ultimately I wanted to have a new name that did not feel tainted by what had happened to me. So that's why ultimately I changed my last name to my husband's. Even though that was something that growing up I never ever believed I would do. And still troubles me sometimes that I had to erase my own identity because of the patriarchy and also what was done to me when I was doxxed. If you google search my original name you will still find horrible things said about me. Personal information, photos, that kind of thing. So it does still hurt that my name was stolen from me in that way.
I had to change my whole name and my whole identity really to disappear from an ex partner, and I chose my new names because they're more international. And my first name, the name that I go by, is derived from the meaning for 'foreign' or 'strange', because that's how I felt about my new identity at the time. Although now, over a decade later, I feel that trauma a little less but just today my current partner - we're getting married soon and he was at the registry office filling out his form and he texted me and asked me what my old name was in case they needed it for something. And even typing out the old name made me cry. Because it wasn't my choice.
I changed my name because when I was born my name was picked for me by the leader of the cult that I grew up in. My parents joined a new religious movement, also possibly known as an apocalyptic cult, and the charismatic leader of the cult often named children. And so when I was born, my parents went to her and she gave me both my first and my middle name. When I turned 25 I decided to change my name, because I was no longer in the cult and my name was not especially special to me. In particular I picked my new name because my parents had always told me the story about how they had come to the charismatic leader and told her the name that they had thought of. And she said, "No, no, that that name won't work. It's a name for an artist and your daughter needs a name that will be for a fighter, because the world needs soldiers and it needs warriors, not artists." So she gave me that name, and when I reached twenty-five years old I legally changed my name. My first name is the name that my parents had suggested and my last name comes from my partner. It's not his last name but it's part of his name. So it's a little bit more subtle than if I just changed my last name to his. And I'm very happy with my new name. And that is my story.
My name is Sam Gladstone and I did not change my name but right for myself but rather for my chosen profession. I am a pro wrestler/drag queen. I go by the name of Rhys Indigo. I chose to have a different name for my in-ring name, simply because my name Sam Gladstone, it doesn't have punch. It's not something that you can hear as announced like "In the ring, Sam Gladstone!" It just doesn't work. Whereas Rhys Indigo is something that people can chant, you can get behind, "In-di-go! In-di-go!" And it helps with a pop, it's something you can sell - and it sticks out. It's familiar but it's unusual.
I changed my name many years ago, my last name, because it was a name that I shared with my father and my sister with whom I no longer had a relationship, and I did not want to carry that name anymore. So I chose my maternal grandmother's maiden name.
Between the time I was born and the time I went to high school, I was known by three different last names. So there was my name at birth, and then my name was changed legally based upon an adoption by my first stepfather. Then when I started high school, I started to use as an alias the name of my second stepfather. Well it got really complicated when I went to college, because I had records in two different names, neither of which were my original birth name. When I was 19, I was reacquainted with my biological paternal side of my family, and there was a little bit of an expectation that I would change my name back to my birth name. Well, I found out that my father had had a second son, and he named his second son exactly the same name that he named me at birth. So what I did to get rid of all the complications was: when I was 19, I went to my local probate court in my town and I legally changed my name by dropping all of my last names. So now my full legal name is made up of my first and middle names, which is what everyone called me when I was a kid anyways, and I really liked that. So I felt like when I changed my name, I was reclaiming my identity.
I changed my name from Kirsten to Kit because I'm a transgender man and I don't identify with my feminine birth name. I chose Kit because it was sort of a nickname that my partner would use with me sometimes. And it just felt better to me. It seems kind of weird to think about my partner naming me in a way, but that's cool. I changed my name before I came out as trans, and initially my dad - even before he knew I was trans - he was kind of offended by the fact that I'd changed my name at all and he would like passive aggressively, outright aggressively, use my birth name instead of my chosen name, which was very frustrating for me. I didn't actually really hate my birth name until he started doing that. I mean, I didn't like it because it didn't suit me genderwise, but then just having that association kind of made it worse in a lot of ways. Since I came out to him as trans, he's still not calling me Kit, but he calls me ‘Junior’, which has a very masculine feel to it to me, but it sort of feels like he doesn't really like the name Kit. I think he's avoiding it.
My name is Lysander. And I changed my name because I'm trans, and changing your name in the trans community is somewhat of a rite of passage in the sense that you get to experiment and put words to this blossoming identity that you have. Another factor for me anyway was the fact that my father disowned me after I came out. It's been a strange experience going on hormone replacement therapy, in the sense that it's changing my body to look more like him, which is very confronting. So I can't escape him in that respect; but I can shed his name, and in the process reclaim my identity and my history as my own in that respect. I chose Lysander because I've always loved Shakespeare. And growing up I felt like I was Helena. She was tall like I was tall. She was sort of gangly and awkward and desperate to be loved. But you know transitioning and coming into myself, I feel much more like Lysander now. Who is still passionate and creative and just like the most beautiful soul. And it feels much more close to who I am.
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The Allusionist 2018 autumn live tour is in its latter stages, but there are some tickets left for the shows in Vancouver, Los Angeles and St Paul which are happening in the first half of November. Find out about those at theallusionist.org/events, and while you’re there, click over to the Merch tab, I’ve got some new t-shirts for sale that are Winterval-themed, for all your multi-denominational festivewear needs. Or think of it as your fatigues for the war on the war on Christmas.
The Allusionist belongs to Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best podcasts on the interwaves. Find all our shows at radiotopia.fm. We can make them thanks to you listeners. Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
xoanon, noun: (in ancient Greece) a primitive wooden image of a deity.
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This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with editorial help from Eleanor McDowall and Martin Austwick, who also makes the music for this show. Thanks to all you listeners who told us about your names.
You can find the show on Facebook and Twitter - search for allusionistshow. Over on the show’s website, you can hear the other episodes in the Name Season, and indeed every episode of the Allusionist, for each of which there is also a list of additional reading matter and such, there’s the full dictionary entry for each randomly selected word, there are listings for all the live events I’m doing - essentially, for all your Allusional needs, visit theallusionist.org.