I'll go first:
So I originally was going to go with Sara. I've always vibed with the name, I used it in video games for my characters constantly, and it just felt right. Also for Sara Kerrigan who's "I'm queen bitch of the universe" line was probably my first experience of gender envy. The problem is at this point Sara had become a character in what was my most popular series at the time so it felt weird naming myself after a character I only retroactively realized was a self-insert of my gender needs.
I next was going to go with Jessica, for Jessica Drew from Marvel - specifically the Ultimate version of the comics. While the Ultimate comic line is largely remembered for being mostly bad and had the one redeeming quality of introducing us to Miles Morales (which 100% is the best thing to come from the Ultimate universe), it also gave us Jessica Drew of Earth 1620 - a clone of Peter Parker who just had the Y chromosome replaced with an X, and also had all of Peter's memories. The character was incredibly trans coded and fascinated me long before I figured out I was trans...but one of my closest friends is Jessica and so it felt weird.
So then I was going to with Rachel for Rachel Summers from the X-Men as well as to give myself a name that tied me to my Jewish origins but then someone asked "Can I call your Rach?" and the sound of that shortening was so very much not a vibe that I dropped the name entirely.
Then I remembered Sylvia. Sylvia Dawngard was a character of mine in a long running FATE game I was playing with friends at the time. While not my first TTRPG character to be a woman - that was a Sara - Sylvia was the one that gave me gender euphoria. A changeling in a world were that meant "Human who got abducted by fae and was raised by them," Sylvia was the champion of the long forgotten Autumn Court of fae and over the course of the game came to weild the Eclipse Hammer (which I now have tattooed on my arm) and just was one of my favorite characters I've ever played. She also was constantly torn between her fae upbringing and human nature, not feeling like she fully belonged in either world, which only changed when she met her Nephilim girlfriend Kohabiel and together they formed a new home and... yeah, I loved that character.
Equally importantly there's no shortening of that name I dislike. Syl, Sylvie, Vee, Via, Lyv, Sylv, basically any version of the name worked perfectly for me.
So yeah, that's my story. What's yours?
This'll be a long post 'cause plurality.
First up Leolin was our chosen name before realising plurality. It's an anglicisation of Llewelyn, drawing from the two flase beliefs that the Llew in Llewlyn is llew as in lion, and that the Leo in Leopold is leo as in lion to morph the Llew into Leo. It ends up as a distincly Wenglish (Welsh-English) name, and also relating to cats like our legal name is, and pronounceable by non Welsh speakers as long as they don't overthink it. We had actually been using Leo as a fursona name, and also our Animal Crossing name, but it wasn't intended to become our primary name at first.
Individual headmates under the cut.
I had a nasty customer while working a stressful cafe job. She had a bad attitude, ordered a complicated drink that she made me repeat to her several times to make sure I got it right, and when I asked for the name for the order she said "Penelope" and I immediately thought "No. That's my name. You don't have one any more."
So I started taking Penelope for a test ride, years before I was brave enough to come out fully. I immediately fell in love with it. Not just because it's a pretty name, but because it also shortened to Penny, which resulted in me using it for a lot of puns, which give me no end of joy.
It was the light in the tunnel of my difficult gender journey. One that felt like it nearly killed me on a regular basis. But I survived, I'm the happiest I've ever been, and now it's my legal name!
I guess it's true what they say: A Penny saved, is a Penny earned.
I spent ages running through a million names, many of which I liked a whole lot, but I had three criteria I had to meet:
- It had to not be so performatively "weird" OR performatively "pretty" that people would have even more ammo to not take me seriously than they already do (the saga of whether or not I should just lean into not being taken seriously is outside of the scope of this thread)
- It had to not be obviously "from something", or belonging to anyone else I know, because I didn't want to feel like I "owed" my name to anyone else
- Nothing that would make me get a song stuck in my head upon hearing my name for the rest of my life, the way I have to get "the ace of spades" stuck in my head every single time I play solitaire
- I was one of like five kids with my deadname in my grade at school, and a zillion others in pop culture, and this was finally my opportunity to be free of collisions like that
I've already forgotten the really cool names that rule 1 made me rule out, but rule 2 ruled out ones like "Carmen" (Sandiego), rule 3 ruled out "Rosa" (Car The Garden), and "Gloria" was ruled out by both (Gopher, and Van Morrison, AND Laura Branigan). And I didn't just want to go with "Raven" because I still liked the idea of having a separate online name and "real name" (my "grocery store name" as I was thinking of it).
At some point I realised that while I didn't want to feel like I was borrowing a name from something, I did like the idea of having some justification for my name, in case people tried to shoot it down? (Which, hey! They did! Go figure??) And I forget exactly how, but something clicked with the fact that the my eye color had always been described as "hazel"? And I thought it was a cute name, while not trying TOO HARD to be cute, and a little pleasantly weird while still being normal enough that I figured (incorrectly) that no-one could scoff at it? And the only pop culture association I could think of it having was "Witch Hazel" from Looney Tunes, which, frankly, seemed both obscure enough and seemingly-not-aspirational enough that no-one would accuse me of naming myself after her (the extent of my actual witchiness is outside the scope of this thread).
At this point in my life, I was getting ready to start a new job within a matter of weeks, and I EXTREMELY wanted to be able to show up on the first day and introduce myself to my coworkers with a name I intended to keep (I had already been forced by circumstances to kick off the job application process with "hey I'm a trans woman but I haven't settled on a new name yet hahah oof" but I was determined to have the matter settled before I met the rest of my coworkers face to face; honestly I wonder how much longer I might have spent dithering on a name if I hadn't had that deadline forcing the matter?), so after finally landing on a name that felt pretty good while also having no strikes against it, I took the plunge.
Shortly after that, I realised that the name "Hazel" is probably like the single most common name in the entire world for trans women, and also for horny furry OCs; I'd even known several of each before picking the name, but they just hadn't really come to mind when I was mentally trying to remember any collisions??? (Actually, I did remember one, but I barely knew her, and I asked her for permission to use the name too anyway, and she said it was fine; now I can't even remember who it was, just how awkward that twitter DM felt but how much even more awkward I would have felt if I hadn't asked and she'd seen me just take it without asking....) I also then realised that my eyes aren't even hazel, they're like brown/green central heterochromatic?? (Some sources say that is what 'hazel eyes' mean; it seems like everyone just kinda makes this stuff up...) And, I only get Hazel's Modus Operandi caught in my head when signing my name sometimes. (I still cannot explain how that didn't occur to me when trying to think of issues. But wow, the youtube comments are full of people saying they got the name from that song, heh.....)
Anyway, there should be some lesson in the fact that I messed up and the name I settled on didn't fit most of my rules in the end after all but I'm still happy with it, but, my capacity to learn that lesson, is outside the scope of this thread. But little by little I'm starting to inch towards feeling vindicated in my good taste rather than feeling incompetent when I see another Hazel out there.