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.

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

the only alternative I could think of was just not having a name, which would have been a massive inconvenience.

Had a classmate who I sat with every class for a semester. We never told each other our names. Was great (for reasons I couldn’t comprehend at the time). For someone you don’t need to talk about in any other contexts, its surprising not inconvenient

I didn’t ever really consider changing my name before. I thought it was fine most of the time… except when I was with other people with the same name and I felt sort out of place having that name (or maybe I’d have preferred them to all just change their names or be less masculine). Its not a deadname though.

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