hal

I really like Nathan, which was my birth name. But not how masculine it was... and I'm Genderfluid so going something strictly fem also felt wrong. So Nat made the most sense! Gender neutral, can be short for various names in either gender, works out well!!

i found that most people think im gloomy and depressing but some find me calming and refreshing, like the rain. so i went with rainy ☺️

My dead name started with M, so I went M****** -> M -> Em -> Emily. At first I thought it was kinda a placeholder name and I would switch later but I grew into it.

so when we realized we were trans we kinda struggled a bit with figuring out a name, and went looking for a bunch of stuff online and old ideas we'd had pre-hatching and everything. first idea we very briefly tried out was freya, because hell yeah celebrating nordic roots and all that, but for some personal reasons we quickly decided that wasn't right.

then came the three favorites that we had narrowed things down to. the first, anna, was one we liked, but for other personal reasons, we decided to veto that one. (said personal reasons were not quite as relevant when a headmate later decided to claim that name.) our next favorite was victoria, which... honestly in retrospect, kinda surprised we didn't go for? we think it's a nice name (which is again why one of us later adopted it too), and it would have been a hilarious resolution to a conflict related to our birth name (our mom wanted to name us after a family member (victor (probably spelled with a k but details)), our dad and our grandmother (mother's side) wanted something from our dad's side, our actual birth name was a compromise), but... we didn't.

and the reason, as far as we remember? the sounds were too harsh. our initial realization had us hard recoiling from masculinity of any kind thanks to all that dysphoria, and we just wanted something soft. a name where the pronunciation rolled, instead of chopped. our deadname was hard, every syllable a hammer, and we wanted none of that anymore. was it a good decision? dunno. is it even possible to make a good decision a couple weeks into the quagmire that's rebuilding your sense of gender?

so we had our third alternative: lillia. unusual (if you ignored the proximity to lily), light, and honestly just what we needed then. it was one of few names that had stuck out to us during our exploration of names, and we decided we'd try it out for a while at least, when we came out to our first irl friends and such. and then it stuck around long enough to become our legal name.

(and while we've kinda partially grown out of it individually over the years (turns out a lot of our general drive for hyperfemininity was dysphoria, who'd've thunk?), it still makes a lovely body name for us. perhaps more feminine than we'd like, but we are all fine with it still and enjoy it. which is very good, because legally we're stuck with it for another 7 years)

nothing really all that special, i just stole it from a fictional character i related to a little too much

we changed our name a bunch since we came out at 14; we started out voxel (from minecraft's track 'dead voxel'), didn't stick > tried out joshua for a while but we have a half-brother who's name is josh so that wasn't gonna work > tried out jamison / jamie fer a bit but it didn't stick > went by zero for a while after the dog from the nightmare before christmas > settled on miles (after miles edgeworth from ace attorney) because we like mi- sounds, an then picked cecil as our middle name (after cecil from wtnv, gay icon.)

literally just the first one that popped into my head. considered a few others but I like this one a lot so it stuck

i had tried out a number of names as pen names, but most of them felt borrowed from characters more than anything that spoke to me personally. some of them literally were just ripped from games/shows/books, but my feelings for those names aside, i wanted something i could make my own independent memory associations with, rather than having this pre-existing character define it for me.

so i spent some time looking through sites that had a bunch of names, and spun through them for several weeks. when i found one i liked, i'd say it to myself in conversational sentences, as though someone were addressing me with it. eventually i came to lyra, which didn't immediately appeal to me, but idk. the more i sounded it out to myself and spelt it out in ink, i just grew to like the feel and sound of it. its connections to the constellation and the myth of orpheus, given that i'm a poet myself!

something that didn't occur to me until i read your own post is that, back in the days when i played a lot of WoW in high school, i kinda transitioned from playing my first character, a male hunter, to a female paladin. her name was maxlyra, which is so funny to think about in retrospect. that draenei was living the maxxed lyra life before i even considered that i was trans! gods that's so crazy to think about now, hahaha

in the early 90s I played a lot of party CRPGs that wanted you to name characters individually. for variety I started opening a text editor, flailing wildly at the keyboard, and then scanning for an aesthetic (or at least pronounceable) substring. this was also how I named my first two fursonae in 1995, and while I made a handful more in '96, none of them stuck like those two: Lenester and Akhra.

when the untold layers of spackle and duct tape finally gave out and my egg exploded in 2019, I spent maybe six months trying not to be That Furry. I considered Rhiannon, after the Fleetwood Mac song; I'd used it here and there through the years, including one of the '96 sonas. I asked my mother if there was a planned name if the doctor said I was a girl: yes, Clingsong, because my parents were goddamn last-wave hippies 😹 (and that became my sister's middle name so it was mercifully out of consideration)

but Akhra had already been the name through which I'd interacted with the world as a woman for a quarter century. whether or not I could see or accept it as such, whether or not it had been boxed into safe corners, my public social transition really started in 1995 and no lingering cringe anxiety could interrupt so much inertia. it was a comfortable well-worn name, saturated with happy memories.

so I embraced the keysmash, and legally became my fursona.

In 2018 I took in a small plant of unknown type from my workplace, as it was getting to big for its pot, and happily cared for it. As it goes with most things of that nature I have to name them at some point. Some time that year I stumbled upon the painting 'Yseult la blonde' by Gaston Bussiere. To this day still the most beautiful painting in the world, if you ask me.
So, I figured, why not name the plant "Isolde", the German version of the name.
In 2018 my egg was starting to slowly crack here and there, but I wasn't yet at a point where I was looking for a name for myself.
Sadly, somewhere in 2019 plant-Isolde contracted some kind of insects and despite my best efforts, it didn't survive.
By that point I was already thinking of choosing another name for myself, but nothing had come up yet. So I thought "Since the plant-Isolde died, why not try that name out for myself?" and I liked it from the get-go.
Also was kind of nice to carry on that name for my first ever house plant.
When I found out later it means "iron" or "the iron fighter" (in German "die eiserne Kämpferin", which has a much nicer ring to it imo), I was delighted.

When I then came out that same year, in 2019, it was nice to have a new name already in hand. A fitting, true name. One that I was very happy with and I still say it gladly and proud, whenever I introduce myself.

However, with the way the German law works currently (thankfully finally changing in a few months), the name changing process can be quite intensive and costly, so I didn't immediately jump to doing that, after I had come out to almost all of my social circles.
During the early pandemic years in 2020, I stumbled upon a tweet of someone joking that "nine months after the western lockdowns in March, a bunch of kids would be born that very well might be named 'Dystopia'", which I immediately took a liking to, except the dystopic part of that name didn't quite work for me.
I then quickly settled on 'Utopia' as a second name. It felt fitting, finally having realized who I truly was, being a woman, with a smidge of my typical bullshit, i.e. naming myself after an impossible to reach, perfect state.

And, well, after spending over a thousand Euros and going through the German legal system to change my name, I've now been 'Isolde Utopia' for a while I couldn't be happier. Well, maybe that I don't get to use my second name as much.
I'm not stopping there, though.
As I only had one name for the large majority of my life so far, I was always a bit envious of other's second or even third names.

When the new law finally comes into effect this November here in Germany, I will be there day one, to add at least two more names to the current two.
They are 'Medusa' and 'Kassandra'.
The Medusa out of the Greek mythology had been one of the first big female characters I took a real (but back then secret) liking to. Also would still love to have snakes as hair, but I'm settling for the name, for now.
This one I decided upon in 2022, when I remembered that whole topic during my childhood and how much it meant to me.
The Kassandra is a later addition, from last year, because I wanted the K initial back from my deadname. From all the ones with the initial K I thought of, it's the only one I really like and also the connection to the character in Greek mythology helps (the one that predicts things, but nobody believes her).

Also helps that both can be shortened in ways I like a lot more, like "Em" or "Kass", than the current "Isi" I get from a lot of people for Isolde.

However, with a few months of idle waiting time ahead of me, I'm thinking of another one. Maybe with the initial V. Haven't decided upon this one yet, though.

P.S.: Sylvia's a great name! As are the shortened versions!

Ultimate Jess my beloved

i spent a while thinking up some names¹, and eventually picked 'ira'; i kinda liked 'iris' and 'elise' but i knew people with those names which felt weird. it was gender neutral², so i could start using it well before doing anything else.

after a little while, i started to dislike how gender neutral it was. i'm a girl and gosh darn it i want that unambiguous. so I dug around more and found that it's kinda a corruption/variant of the name Hera, which was cool, so I briefly considered that, but i did not have the confidence in 2020 to name myself a god. but just a little further and it's a shortening (in some Slavic languages) of Irene and Irina, which i really liked the sound of. Irene is a name that goes back a ways in my family, but i really didn't want to get called Rene, so Irina it was. i workshopped the pronunciation a bit (read: looked at the way it was pronounced in a few languages) and settled on one i liked!

now i mostly go by Irina publicly, and end up with the shorter Ira³ if i know someone well, and they're cool enough to gender me correctly with an ambiguous name.

1. some of these became middle names

2. turns out this is kinda regional! depending on the place it's neuter, masculine, or feminine. as far as i can tell your answer to "is this name masculine" is basically determined by how big your local jewish communities are

3. the i is pronounced differently between the two, so that's a fun trap i set for myself!

I just chose a name that was easy to remember and something that I like enough. Plain ass nam e.

I bounced a bunch of names around and kept coming back to Kylie like settling into the lowest energy state.

And I'm still not sure about it, 5 years later.

Honestly, I only recently started to see some legitimacy in a name I've unwittingly been mulling over, basically since first seeing it in a wii game I first played as a teenager that broke my brain in some of the best ways, which wasn't even the name of a character. It feels a little pretentious and perhaps carries some weird cultural history, but after using it as like, a name for a fake user account for a past job, I don't know if I can shake it.

I've never felt like I liked my name, but I don't think it's even offensive enough to bother me enough to change it. I've never felt like there was a name that I could like, or even find more suitable. Even though this one that's lurked in my memory for over a decade feels ill-fitting, I think it may still be the most resonant option, though I've seldom considered anything else.

Still not figured out anything I'm going to do about all this gender, but more and more I feel like I must try Something

i was considering a few different names, charlie/charles as my other top contender. i wanted something kind of gender ambiguous, and at that time i was going by a shortening of my birthname that started with R. i liked the alliteration potential of my first and last name starting with R so i focused on that.
i dont know why i did this, but i wrote "remy" on two notebook pages like 200 times during a class in high school and just lodged it in my brain so hard i couldnt go by anything else.
alternatively i share the shortening of a name with my favorite actor to ever play sherlock holmes, jeremy brett.
and if not just doubling down on that fact, my middle initials are JM for james moriarty too.

Had a big self hating complex fueled by a bunch of shitty theology dumped into my brain that the only way to use the overwhelming amount of anger i carried inside myself was to subsume all emotion and pursue capital J Justice as an ideal

Had a total breakdown over the course of a year that made me question everything i ever believed as true, completely reframed my own feelings as being rooted in genuine care for others and myself, and thought hey y'know, Justine is a real pretty name

I had a lot of trouble finding mine. At the time I wasn't ready to admit I was a girl yet so I was trying to find a gender neutral name. The one I ended up going with is from a song I used to listen to in college about cutting off parents to give yourself a second chance. That's exactly what I ended up doing later on (basically minimum contact at this point) and it just so happened to start with the same letter as my deadname too. I'm not sure if that's the reason why but it instantly felt like me. Also it's technically gender neutral buuuut only in other regions, egg me was coping so hard.

old host stole her name from a body pillow. these days we pick up pony names or random adjectives/adverbs

currently considering Sophia. I haven't spent much time thinking about this, though.
design goals met: keeps initials; short; simple; boring; introduces no ambiguity; trivial localization; speaks of me (knowledge; infodumping)
misses: unambiguous spelling; no objectionable shortenings (soph? really??)

Genderbent my deadname -> fiction name -> long and unsuccessful ordeal trying to choose a meaningful name that hit all the right notes -> aggressively normal name that I used as a stopgap after an international move. Having a new social context really made it take on a life of its own and no amount of overthinking could match that, so I stuck by it and couldn’t be happier

I’ve tended to do the slow/small/incremental approach to transition, so while I considered more definitively feminine options (Sophie, for Sophie Hatter; Sarah, a family name) I ended up chopping off most of my original name and throwing an X on the end as something of a placeholder, and it’s stuck. I’ve come to really love both that it’s gender-ambiguous, and that the most likely name for it to be derived from, Rebecca, is both Jewish and feminine.

When I realized I was trans I started looking at names on and off for years. As long as I was doing a sort of enby dude in a dress look the old name didn't cause any practical problems so there wasn't a lot of urgency. I wanted to keep the initials (they appear in lots of places) and really wanted something where the obvious shortened forms didn't sound unpleasant or just obviously masculine, which really cut the list down. But then the pandemic hit, I covered my face with a mask, and suddenly people assumed that name obviously isn't mine. Sometimes I was 'obviously' picking up my husband's order for him, sometimes more confusion about what's going on, they need to see ID, wait, whose ID is is this, and so on. Clearly this was going to cause problems.

And I ended up...sticking an "a" on the end. Which feels comedic after years of thinking about it. But I'm happy with it, it's funny to have gone from one of the most common of all names to one that's very closely related and yet actually a bit rare, people don't know how to pronounce or spell it, that's very new to me. Plus if you don't pay attention you might not even notice the difference. At the time I joked that maybe people will think it's just a typo, but actually a couple of times maybe people really have thought so? It's hard to say for sure if they figured it out or really figure that typo must happen to me all the time, but if so still don't have to make a fuss out of it.

i'm just grateful nobody remembers venus envy anymore

early on i didn't feel i deserved to call myself female etc. (internalized transphobia, the usual) and one manifestation was i gravitated toward a name that had a short version that sounded gender-neutral when spoken. and i kept it. it's a pretty cool name despite the somewhat worrisome initial reasoning. i forget if i had other notable feelings there.

meanwhile my middle name has many similarities to my old one, similar letters and sounds, but is also a name i have some fondness for. it is easy to go by it, like as a nickname, when the situation seems amenable.