Friday five on a Wednesday

[cosmolinguist]

1) Do you like your birth-name? Why?

I don't have very strong feelings about it one way or the other any more.

I have at various times both liked and disliked that it's relatively uncommon.

As a kid I wanted a name I could have a nickname from, which I didn't have. I never really liked abbreviated versions of it when people tried to address me by them.

When I moved here I didn't like that it has a vowel sound that Brits pronounce differently than I do so it was difficult to make myself understood properly when introducing myself.

And eventually I didn't like that it, while it is technically gender neutral in that everyone can think of two or three characters who have it, it really isn't understood that way and especially when it was most difficult to me to be parsed as Not A Girl, it was important for me to remove as much ambiguity as possible.

2) If you could change your name to anything else, what would it be?

Erik, apparently!

In the early 2000s I remember wishing I was called Alexis. Which makes sense from the perspectives of different things it could be shortened to, and gender neutrality.

3) What names would you consider giving your children?

I cannot imagine having children. But I like names from my family: Carl, Frederick, Otto, Anna, Josephine...

I looked in to family names because I'm the kind of trans person who would have asked my parents what they would have named me if they'd known but since I couldn't I tried to reconstruct the kind of thing they might have chosen based on what I know about how they did choose my brother's and my names.

4) If you had a band, what would you name it, and why?

Depends on what kind of band it is I think. Different music suits different names.

5) Is there a name that you completely hate? Why?

I completely hate the middle name I was given. It's very femme, it was literally chosen as a girl's version of the name of someone I was being named after, for a stupid reason, and who I have no real connection to. And I've known a few annoying people who have had that name, heh. But I wouldn't hate it if not for my own connection to it.

Comments

[otter]

I wrote my own version. Good to learn more about you :)

[cosmolinguist]

And you!

[mst3kforall]

That was interesting. Hah, I hate my middle name too, in my case mostly because it’s sortof nowhere and it sounds like my mom’s middle name which she and I hate. At least it wasn’t “Ann” that was the middle name everyone seemed to have at the time.

[cosmolinguist]

It's funny she'd give you such a similar one if she hates it too. Both my parents hate their middle names so I suppose my brother and I were doomed to.

All the girls in my class had "Ann" or "Marie" as middle names, to the extent that once in like third grade when we were all guessing each other's they had no idea what to suggest when mine is neither of those.