One of the fun parts about being trans is now there’s this name that the government and most strangers recognize me as that I and my close friends don’t, but every time I think about the fact that I have a deadname now, I keep getting struck by this strange feeling that my deadname never felt like mine, even through years of me actively using it as my name. I remember trying to change it was I was about 17 but I never did because I only tried to think of masc names. For as long as I can remember, I could never look at my deadname and feel like it was mine. I didn’t like it and it felt strange to even associate that name with me; I only ever did because the only alternative I could think of was just not having a name, which would have been a massive inconvenience. I never even really thought it was a bad name, I just hated it for me
Did anyone else ever feel like this or am I just crazy?
My deadname feels so distant from me that even when I meet or hear of a person whose name is the same as my deadname, it feels surreal. Like, my deadname has always just been a cue for me to respond to someone, just like how someone saying “Hey!” to catch my attention doesn’t mean that “Hey” is like a name to me. I do not have personal association with that name, and I never did. I haven’t even legally changed my name yet, but I will do so very soon, and it feels odd for me to remember that my chosen name is not my legal name quite yet. I forgot that it’s still not on my ID rather frequently!
I never liked my old name but only because it’s way too common. There were always like 2 other kids in every class with the same name.
I kid you not, my dad wanted to name me Vanguard, but my mom wouldn’t let him.
I’ve been pissed about this my whole life
you could have been the one true leftist
same feeling
before i knew i was bigender i wanted to just change it to literally any other girl name (didn’t really know what i wanted yet) and my parents got super mad at me, lol
I completely understand where you are coming from and you are not crazy. For me I have complex PTSD because of my traumatic childhood. That means my default model for dealing with trauma is dissociation. So I see parts of myself as different aspects of who I am. One part of myself is the one that has my given name or what people call a deadname. He is one of our protectors and in IFS speak he is a firefighter. That is why I dislike the idea of thinking of him as dead. I know this sounds a little different from what you are experiencing but I figured it was close enough that I would tell you about it. Hopefully you take some comfort in it.
I also relate to mine using IFS. The protector is still around, but it never really was a ‘he’. Just a protective part wearing that ‘he armor’ to avoid experiencing more trauma.
But I generally relate to my parts as different animal or elemental spirits (did a lot of psychedelics before getting into IFS, still do a lot of psychedelics, but I did a lot before too).
This particular protector is chameleon.
That is what I love about IFS. It just seems so adaptable to different situations.
Yeah it’s a really effective tool for understanding different parts of ourselves and learning to hold space for all of those parts.
I see my therapist this morning and really need to, I’ve been disassociating the last 3 days and stuck in boy mode, mostly due to family shame and a stupid aunt running her transphobic mouth.
Literally no, I never did. People would mispronounce it, it’s not super common, and I’d never correct em. People thought my name was another dude name cause they misheard mispronounciations. Never corrected them either. I didn’t think much of it at the time, I knew names were important to other people but I literally just never cared.
I am lucky enough for most of the names in my ethnic language to be non-gendered.
I moved my dead name to my middle, but my old middle name always caused intense emotional distress and in hindsight it’s almost certainly because of how masculine it was. It never felt like me, way before those feelings had a deeper and more understood origin.
My old first name isn’t quite gender neutral, but it’s rare as a femme name, and it’s normal enough as a feminine middle name and it shows up hyphened a bit - desiring to have my transition mark an evolution, a metamorphosis rather than like, a stark death/rebirth, and keeping the old name but deprecating its primacy was the fitting move for me.
I spit on my dead middle name though. Awful. Fucking disgusting.
My deadname wasn’t even a nice name to have. I have always felt it was this shameful piece of clothes I was forced to use. Never liked it, never felt like it was mine. I’m so glad I changed it for a cute name.
No, but it was the name my husk of a body was known by so I had to manage.
My new one has nothing in common with the previous trash
i didnt really start hating it until i started going by my chosen name. which checks out compared to how ive felt about a ton of other gender things. like i didnt rly realize how much i hated my body hair until it was gone, or my voice until i realized that id subconsciously changed it to be more feminine. basically i just masked so hard that i forgot i was masking. i also have cptsd so that probably contributed to it
Same, I didn’t realize I had gender dysphoria essentially, until I got a taste of gender euphoria. Now, the dysphoria more clearly is disassociation. When I’m in boy mode, euphoric moments can feel like they happened to someone else. Like they’re someone else’s memories.
Disassociation.
And I have CPTSD as well. So maybe there’s a correlation there.
Now, the dysphoria more clearly is disassociation
god, it took me so long to realize this. in my case i think the neglect i went through growing up caused me to dissociate from anything that was uncomfortable, which is why it’s so hard for me to actually feel my dysphoria and why i didnt know in the same way that it feels like other trans people knew. so there’s definitely a correlation for me
My dead name always felt like a curse word to me. I didn’t realize it until I started going by my chosen name, though. Which feels affirming and euphoric to hear :)
Mine didn’t either. I liked my dead name, it was a fun name. Unique, fun to say, a bit hard for people around me to pronounce but 2/3 ain’t bad. But it didn’t feel like it was mine.
No. I actually ditched it 14 years prior to my egg cracking and went by a pseudonym I created.
I feel weird because my parents were cool enough to give me a name with feminine version I’m very happy with. It did take me for fucking ever to lean into that though.
I generally felt very disassociated with my entire “self” pre-transition including name, body, presentation, socialization. Like the feeling that this thing wasn’t me, but something I was forced to pilot.
