A Boy Named Sue

Why is it that, if you announce you're changing your sex, so many people automatically presume you will want to change your name to the opposite-gender equivalent of your birth name? For example, if your birth name is 'Sue', that you would automatically want to be 'Stu' instead because it's close enough to what you're already called?

I know some people do do this. Some people don't have any major dysphoria about their birth name and they seem to associate with it in some way, even if it is the wrong gender. So it would be simpler to just change to a correct-gender equivalent of their birth name, or to leave it alone if their name is androgynous enough.

But my name doesn't have a male version (although there are similar-sounding male names, similar to the 'Sue'/'Stu' example above) and more importantly, I've never felt that my name is actually a part of me. It's always been a convenient label that other people have used when they want to get my attention but it's never felt like it belongs to me - seriously, they might as well call me 'hey you' for the amount my name means to me. It's a name that belongs to other people so they have something to call me.

If I'm changing my life to honour my true identity, why would I want to retain some part of the erroneous identity my parents conferred upon me when I was born?

The fact is: I don't want anything to do with that horrible name. It's unmistakably female and it can't be lengthened or shortened to anything masculine, so I'm happy to just kick it to the kerb. But that leaves me with a bigger problem: which, of the thousands of male names available, should I select for myself?

I think I've come up with a very easy answer.

You see, when my mother was pregnant with me (back in the early 1970s) there was no way of determining the sex or gender of your unborn child. There was some folklore in my family that there had been no female children born for four generations and indeed, my father was one of four brothers, so nobody was surprised when my mother's first-born child had been a son.

So when my mother miscarried her second pregnancy a couple of years later, she presumed that that had been a daughter and that there was something wrong with my father's line which would mean she couldn't have any daughters with him. So when her third pregnancy (with me) was a healthy one, she resigned herself to the thought that she must be expecting another son… and my parents picked out a boy's name for him. They decided to name him in honour of his two grandfathers.

How right they actually were about expecting a son - only they wouldn't realise this until many years later.

Unfortunately for me, their second son was born female-bodied and so that original grandfathery name had to be abandoned. Instead they named me after my paternal grandmother (who had desperately wanted a daughter but instead produced four sons). I've always hated that old-fashioned, female name they gave me. But my grandfathers' names are perfectly acceptable even today, almost 100 years after they were named.

So when I decided to transition, the thought occurred to me that I could simply go back to the name my parents had originally intended to give me had I been born male-bodied. It seemed to fit; almost like it would help to heal part of what went wrong when I was assigned the wrong gender at birth.

So that's what I've decided to do. And I'm eternally grateful that my grandfathers weren't named 'Horace' or 'Cuthbert' or something. ;-)