it was a name I read in a book when I was ~11 or 12 and not terribly common then. for some reason I started using it for a character in my head. in my mid twenties, I realized that she was still there, and damn if she didn’t feel like a more real and whole person than me. she felt so much more vivid, vibrant, and concrete, but she was just a fantasy I’d live through when I was bored? I started to spend weeks at a time lost in daydreams that I later realized weren’t really about her but experiences through her, if that makes sense. but haha, very cis. over the next couple of years, those daydreams/dreams shifted and I started to see the chains/barbed wire on her that were constricting her. she was restrained and couldn’t grow or change and it was very apparent to me that it was something I was doing.

it broke down not long after that during an acid trip. I admitted to myself I was trans and needed to transition after a long conversation with her, and I spent a while wrestling with a name, but it was really a foregone conclusion – like what was I going to go with, someone else’s name?

so in a very real way, my name is genuinely, truly my name and has been for most of my life. I was just too disassociated and depersonalized to realize what had happened. it’s also really funny to me that my subconscious went with a deeply literal metaphor for repression. like, I think part of me just got really frustrated with how obtuse I was being and started to get more and more on the nose.

So my deadname is religious. I’m not religious. Not only is it religious it’s an adjective related to something my abusive parents abused me for not being.

So I was at a punk show, it was 2am and I was drunk, and wearing gender affirming clothing in front of other people for the first time ever, it was a month after I had publicly come out as trans on facebook. I got a text from this person who I met at a different punk show asking me if I wanted to play D&D with them and their roommates. I said yeah and we set the time for 4pm the next day. I crashed on a couch at the punk house I was at and the next morning I took a train back into the city to chair an IWW meeting. (Big ups to the fellow worker who held my hair when I was throwing up into the office toilet.) I eventually make it this person’s apartment and I’m greeted at the door by an extremely beautiful woman wearing next to nothing who invites me in. She uses my pronouns without me having to even tell her. I’m extremely overwhelmed, I’m wearing beatup old jeans, combat boots, and a battle jacket, worse I smell like sweat, cigarettes, and beer, I’m also still extremely hungover. She’s apparently the DM. We chat and I meet the third roommate as he’s getting out of the shower, he has a towel around his waist, but I can see a pair of scars on his chest. The DM lady is starting to tell me about an art project she’s starting on involving her estradiol bottles, I think to myself “she’s a bit young for menopause, I wonder why she takes estradiol”.

It hits me. Everybody here is trans. I was invited by a nonbinary person, and their roommates are also trans. Hell yeah. We get to making our character sheets. I lament how hard it is to pick a name. The DM jokingly responds “in character or IRL”, I laugh and say both. The DM offers to help me brainstorm ideas. I’m down. I’d call myself Cornflower after my favorite flower, but I honestly don’t think it’d make a good name for myself. We go through a list of other prairie flowers and I find one I like. I sit with it for 6 months, not really using it, but it just stays in my head. I eventually start naming characters in videogames (my name) and I like it. I take the big leap and use it at Starbucks, to hear an actual human being say my name. The barista compliments me on my name. I start using it with friends, and move up from there. It was actually supposed to be legally changed half a year ago, but covid shut down the court, it’s not going to be legal until december, but goddamn I cannot wait.

Uhhh, it took me like a day to get used to people just calling me my name, though I guess I had the experience of videogame characters calling me by my proper name, so that helped I guess, or maybe my name just fits me really well.