a relative of mine used to plant ieds for nazis to step on and there is no way i could resist naming myself after such a badass

bonus points: she was like 90 years old when she was doing it.

I picked a seemingly obscure female name and then learned that despite being feminine it has almost been exclusively used by men, so then I picked the name of a friend in elementary school who I hung out with a lot in my special needs class, and then I felt uncomfortable with how clunky it was so I picked a name that was similar sounding to it.

I know someone who named herself after her friend’s dog

I was going to joke that if I were trans I would probably(definitely) hit Randomize Name in Skyrim or something, but it turns out a lot of people do that.

It actually seems like a good idea now that i think about it. I’ve also wanted to build a simple program that takes sample names and uses them to generate new names based on letter sequence frequency, but I haven’t got around to it. I made something like that, but more basic than what I want, in a programming class a long time ago but I don’t really do it anymore.

Even that basic version came up with names that sounded like the culture of the sample names, but original. Pretty neat.

Maybe I’ll find time to create that thing.

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.