My parents were supportive, so I wanted to include them since in a way I would be taking away that moment that they named their child. I asked my mom for the list of baby girl names she’d had for me and picked my favourite from them. That way she still had chosen my true name and I also got to choose one that fit me very well.

I stole my name from my kindergarten girlfriend lol

I looked up “plant names for people”

I chose my name when I was 12. I don’t remember exactly, but I hit on the name Audrey and I was like, “I really like that name”. Even back then in the year 2000, I knew I was trans, and so I decided to take the name for time being. It kinda stuck after years and years of being my true name. Unfortunately, I did not come out to anyone for over 20 years, so the only one who knew my name was Audrey was, well, me.

I wanted a science-based name because I’m a little nerd lol. I considered Kelvin at some point. In the end, (and I really can’t remember why I specifically chose it) I named myself after Edmond Halley – Hal as a nickname, as a reference to HAL 9000 of course.

Honestly, I sort of regret it, because Halley isn’t as gender neutral as I thought and everyone considers it a girl name. I wish I’d been more out there and straight up decided to call myself Truck or Brick or something.

Trans guy here. There was no masc version of my deadname, and my parents didn’t have a name picked out for if I’d been AMAB, so those routes were closed to me. I initially tried to pick something where I could keep my initials, but the only names I liked were already “in use” in my social and family circles, and it didn’t feel right.

So I looked at the popularity of my deadname in my birth year, then started from that same rank on the boy name charts for the same year and worked my way out. I found a name of very similar popularity that I really liked, and met my other self-imposed criteria (nickname I liked, no nicknames that I hated, not easily misspelled or confused with a femme name). The benefit of looking at birth year popularity ranks is that I ended up with a name that doesn’t sound “too old” or “too young” for me, which may or may not matter to other people.

My parents did something similar when they named us, so that we’d have names that were recognizable, but we wouldn’t share our name with five other kids in our class. (My mom had a very popular name for her age group and she hated it.)

For my middle name I picked a name I always loved but that I didn’t want for my first name, for practical reasons (easily misspelled, gender neutral, much more popular for younger kids than for my age group). In my area, nobody ever knows your middle name unless you go out of your way to tell them, so I let myself have more fun with it.

It’s been close to a decade and I still love both of them. I “tried it on” with friends for a few months before starting legal paperwork, and I’m glad I did. Some other names I tried out didn’t stick.

Cis-white-gay here, adopted. Changed my name at 25 to completely dissociate myself from my adoptive “family”. Went with a slightly modified version of the name on my original birth records (which I found amidst a bunch of other paperwork that really solidified my decision to leave in the first place – that is a whole other story). I am who I was born to be, not raised to be.

I heard the name as a kid and I always knew it was my name internally. As a kid, I always daydreamt of a pretty girl in an overcast field with the wind blowing against her hair. I decided her name was Leyla. It wasn’t until I came out that I understood that the girl was me, and had always been me.

I stole mine from a videogame way back in highschool, 15 years before I would officially crack.

I played an RPG where the main character just resonated with me greatly. And might have also been the first female lead I’d ever played as. I held into that name as my future daughter’s name, even though I didn’t want kids. So it was an imaginary daughter.

When I came out as trans, I figured that I was that imaginary daughter I had been building in my mind all those years.

I was working through a list of nature-related names, looking for an uncommon one that still sounded like a real name. I was almost ready to try out “Ember”, but then I saw “Hazel” and it just clicked. So that’s what I’ve called myself ever since!

It’s a gender-neutral variation of my birth name. I’m a simple person.

Everybody gather round for a real horror story: I chose mine because of Harry Potter before JKR came out as a transphobe. I already felt the books had problematic elements back when I chose my names (and the writing isn’t like AMAZING or anything), but the fandom made a LOT of things better and wrote a lot of wonderful stuff that reclaimed a bunch of things about her world (sure it was all AUs but still). It was so fun to let my mind run wild in the fandom sandbox - I felt really free.

I had already come out with my names and had been using them for years by the time JKR went all extra with the TERF bullshit. I get depressed thinking about this to this day. Lol.

I didnt know where to look and didnt have any ideas, so I pulled up the list of most popular girls names from my year of birth. It was number 400 something of 500 lol.

When I cracked to enby/genderfluid, I wanted a name that was genderneutral. I’m a fan of Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead, so I thought Ash(ley) worked well. Later I cracked again to transfeminine and thought “yeah, that still works.”

I am cis, but my given name was very aged for my generation and grandmotherly which made me self-conscious as a kid.

When I decided to ditch my name, first I tried using my middle name, but that starts with a different letter and it turns out my brain tunes that out entirely if someone that I wasn’t already listening to calls it out. I had to already be engaged in conversation with someone to respond to it, which doesn’t work great if someone across the room calls out your name to try to show you something cool. My parents never did the full name scolding so I literally almost never have heard my middle name spoken aloud. My dad even thought I had my deceased sister’s middle name the last time I can remember middle names coming up in discussion.

I gave up on the name change for a couple of years, but in high school I decided to give something else a shot. I started using my first initial, but spelled phonetically, for example: K spelled as Kay or L as Elle. That was the solution I needed. If someone shouts it from across the room, my brain alerts just like with my full first name. It’s simple, but it works. I’ve stuck with it for 23 years now.

I highly recommend picking something that has a starting sound similar to your current name so your subconscious brain will still pick up on it, otherwise your friends and family will be shouting your new name over and over to get your attention while you are completely oblivious. My kid is trans and I am going through this now from the opposite end of calling the new name out repeatedly with no response because he also picked a name with no similarity to his given name.