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?
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.