Being trans is difficult and fraught in all kinds of ways, including names. In most cases coming out as trans requires asking people to address us differently than they have in the past. It may seem mundane, but our names are critical to our identities, trans and cis alike. Of course a trans man probably won’t want to go by Brianna or Sophie. A trans woman probably won’t feel comfortable as Jason or Caleb.
There’s this weird and uncomfortable pressure put on trans people to choose names that sounds similar to the names we were given at birth. Caleb might become Caela and Brianna might become Brian. We see this in media, like in Transparent (a show about which I have so many complaints) with Maura, whose given name was Mort. While it’s totally valid to choose a name that sounds like the one that their parents gave them, or maybe the masculine or feminine version of their birth name, or a name with shared etymology, it isn’t something any trans person has to do. Sometimes the sound-alike name is super ugly. Sometimes a trans person wants to completely shed their old identity, and a name like Kylie is just too close for comfort to the name Kyle. There shouldn’t be this quiet pressure on trans people to choose a name that makes their cis pals comfortable.
This is particularly tricky for trans people who aren’t male to female (MTF) or from female to male (FTM). What do we do if we’re genderfluid or agender or demigender or anything else in that middle ground? It can be super stressful. Some people will research names for weeks or months before settling on anything. We're pressured to choose names that reflect how we present-- for example, someone whose style of dress is butch probably isn't going to choose to be called Tiffany.
There are only so many gender neutral names, though, and the world doesn’t really need any more people named Morgan or Taylor. Some names are sort of neutral but swing heavily one way or another, like Avery or Dylan. Some names used to be perceived as masculine and are now perceived as feminine, like Ashley or Aubrey. Weird things influence naming trends, like the sudden fame of someone named Miley. Celebrities actually have a major influence on baby naming at large. They’re also more prone to making more unique name choices than regular folks are.
Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively named their daughter James, and Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis named their daughter Wyatt. James and Wyatt are both name that most of us would think of as definitively male. It's difficult to predict what the namescape will look like in the future, and something that's currently super neutral like Riley or Quinn could be given almost entirely to babies born with one set of external reproductive organs in just 15 or 20 years.
Gender is confusing and names are difficult, and as trans people we have an incredibly strange and unique challenge in self-naming. We struggle with the idea of the outside matching the inside, we struggle with the pronouns people use for us, and we struggle with what we want to be called. It’s scary to me that a name that makes us feel safe and validated in our identity at the time that we choose it could be seen as all wrong later in our lives.
