Child of the Air

I wrote this essay in April, and emailed it out to a number of friends. However, it seems potentially interesting to other people, and I thought it was worth posting here.

I've been meaning to write this essay for a while: I think I promised kaberett that I'd do so at least three or four years ago. Since I've found myself having to explain my name preferences to two different "Trains!" cis people in the past two days, though, I figured I should actually try to do so.

Names and the Trans Community

Names are generally a big deal to the trans community. This is largely because given names in a lot of (but not all) cultures, including European and European-derived ones, tend to be gendered.

This means that binary trans people tend to have to change their given names to avoid being misgendered every time they're mentioned, and non-binary people often find themselves pressured to adopt names that others see as unusual.

Whether or not we choose non-traditional names, a lot of cis people criticize us for using "fake" names, whether because they see name-changes as inherently invalid, or because we haven't been able to, or having chosen to, go through the legal paperwork of a formal name change.

Naturally, this has led to a lot of discourse on the validity of "chosen names," and the question of what makes a name "real."

I don't actually mind my birth name.

Anyway, as a trans person who has a lot of different names, but doesn't feel particularly dysphoric about my birth name, I've always felt a bit out-of-place. Both because all the different names confuse people, and because I get the impression that I'm not "trans enough" if I don't declare my birth name to be "dead" and pick another one.

The thing is, I don't actually mind my birth name the way I'm supposed to. I grew up in an environment where "Daniel" was a very unusual name, and it wasn't one that showed up in the media very often. So I never got the message that it was a "male" name imprinted that deep in my psyche.

What does bother me about the name is the knowledge that other people think of it as a "male" name. And, worse, the idea that if I tell people my name is "Daniel," it will be perceived as claiming to be male, or indicating that I'm not really trans.

Furthermore, I've come to feel a bit more positively about my name's gender implications recently, due to realizing that the Biblical Daniel was a eunuch. (This is implied in the original text, and made canonical in rabbinical literature on the matter in order to satisfy a prophesy in Isaiah 39:7.)

But then, none of my names are chosen...

One might suppose that a name I'd chosen would still be preferable to one that my parents selected for me before I had any say in the matter. However, all of the names people use for me were chosen by others in one manner or another.

One common solution is to call me by my family name, but this name was inherited (as were my given first name, "Daniel," and middle name, which came from my grandfathers), so I can hardly call it chosen.

Others use my initials, which have the same problem. Particularly as my Aunt Donna was calling me by them long before I had any opinion on them as a name.

The nickname "Lemur" probably sounds to people like something I must have chosen myself, but it isn't. People on my high school quizbowl team started calling me it because they claimed that I "screamed like a lemur" when I yelled at someone for not paying attention during a team meeting. The weird, contorted ways I tended to sit on furniture also contributed, I think.

There are other names people sometimes call me, such as "Danush" and "Nervous Frosh" and so forth, but none of them were selected by me.

...and none of my names are real.

What exactly it means for a name to be "real" is kind of ambiguous. If we mean that it's legally recognized, then there's no doubt that my real name is my legal name, but the trans community (and I) would strongly object to this definition of "real name."

If we mean that it has some sort of specific religious or ritual significance, or was official given in a particular ritual---definitions that I imagine would make sense in many cultural and personal contexts---then none of my names are real. I wasn't baptized, or confirmed, or in any other way given a ritual or religious name.

And if we mean a name that has a particular significance to me, or feels like it "really" means me, none of my names feel "real" to me, either.

"Daniel" and "Lemur" are probably the names most likely to get a reflexive head-turn from me, but "Daniel" matches far too many people I know, and "Lemur" sounds far too informal and unprofessional to seem like a real name.

So, unfortunately, none of my names are chosen, none of them are real, and I can't really give you a good answer as to what you _should_ call me. I can't even decide what name to introduce myself as a lot of the time.



** Side note: In the course of writing this, I discovered that the name "Daniel" isn't originally of Hebrew origin. It seems to first be used in the Bible in reference to a Canaanite culture hero who, along with Job and Noah, shows up in a list of three very-holy non-Israelites.