What's In A Name?

So now a diversion from my usual laments.

A person I am just getting to know online changed her name the other day. I see this alot. I know three other girls in the flesh that have changed their names recently too. The name game is interesting to me. Normally our parents pick. We get stuck with whatever their expectations are. But as transwomen, or transmen, we get to decide who we will be. An unusal power for an adult person to have for themselves.

Sure there are nicknames. Things that stuck because your real name did not fit you, or you were "junior" or your name was Mortimer, and you did not like Mort, so now you are known to your friends as Buzz, or something. And that is fun too.

I had an uncle that gave everybody in my family a nickname at birth. For a long time I thought he had just named me and my brother. Then one day when talking to cousins I found out the truth. Everybody had a nick name. This uncle was a great uncle so later I found out that even my dad had a nickname. Funny thing was, the nickname was the name he actually adopted for himself and everybody called him that. To this day, he is still "Joe" to most of his friends.

And so when it came time for me to pick my new name I had to ponder that for a bit. And then I had a revelation, or two.

First, I wanted a name that conjoured an image. Female, mature, intelligent, and maybe a little sexy. I thought about Jennifer, and Stephanie, but decided there were way too many of them already, no offense if your name is Jen or Steph. And then I kind of stumbled on Sharon. Sharon Osbourne, Sharon Stone, Sharon Gless, Sharon Lawrence. All women who played strong female characters, yet none afraid to be feminine. Rose of Sharon, some of which are in my garden. This was me indeed.

Second, I think your name should be anchored to your age. Part of that exercise for me was I wanted four things.

• It was a plausible name for a 4X year old woman (at the time I picked it I was in my 40s)
• It not be a name that could be mistaken for a male
• That it roll with what my last name would be, which I have tinkered with but will keep my original one
• I wanted a name that was common enough for most people to be familiar with it but not so common that in a room of 20 people there would be 4 of us.

This site was helpful with that.

Babynamesworld

Sharon is the 17th most popular name from 1961. You will get maybe 2-3 of us in a room of 100 47 year old women. If the room has mixed ages then even fewer. I only ran into one other at Keystone and one other at Be-All, that made it common in about one in 300 or so. How many Sharon's do you know in real life? I can count them on one hand. Anyhow you get the point.

I looked also in recent years, and found it low on the list, in fact it kind of peaked about the time I was born and has only recently taken a little edge up.

About Sharon - Scroll down a bit for the graph...

Thus if I tell you my name is Sharon, you will probably get an image of a woman who is somewhere between 35-60 years of age. Sorry for the scientific approach but that is my habit, I analyze stuff.

My take is if you pick a name that is not age appropriate you "out" yourself quickly. Or more likely you do not fit in. I want to fit in. So a 50 year old Brittney is kind of out of the question. And yet, there they are...

Again this is just me talking, I looked at the name as being every bit as important in passing and being accepted as woman as my appearance, voice, hair, manner and dress. But as to the name, I wanted it to seem right. I have shown some folks who I have come out to recently in person my pix. After they see me they ask, what is my name? I say Sharon, and universally they have said, yes, of course you are. Just food for thought.

You have to be who you are, nobody else gets to decide that.