Kat
It might be "correct," but signing paperwork with my legal name (i.e, my deadname) feels like fraud. It feels weird, and icky.
That isn't my name any more, or even my identity. But it's the one still recognised in officialdom, so that's who I roleplay as when I do official stuff.
Now I'm starting to wonder whether that isn't a feature - after all, real names have power.
Kit Rhett Aultman
@KatS One of the more confusing things in my study of tea ceremony is that the past masters of my tradition had so many names. Names of childhood, names of adulthood, tea names, Zen names, artistic names, names only known to their mothers...
Makes me realize how weird it is that our culture insists on having only one with little mutability to it.
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Kat
Maybe "deadname" isn't the right term, at least in my case.
That was me, in a former life (a series of them, in a way). But I've pupated and hatched now; my wings are drying and I'm figuring out how to use them.
It's a shame that "caterpillar name" and "butterfly name" are such unwieldy terms because, at least in my case, they're so poetically apt.
Kit Rhett Aultman
@KatS For me, I have a new name but didn't get rid of my old one. It's now a name that's for my partners and old friends to have, as a token of our intimacy and past. The new name is for new people.
And I consider all my names part of my legal signature. I put my new name in quotes to show it's not present on my legal ID but is still part of my name and what I should be called.
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Kit Rhett Aultman
@KatS We, at one point, picked up a cultural idea that all things in this world have some discernible "purpose" intrinsic to them and go outside of it is to "violate its nature", and it gets projected onto all wild manner of things, including something as simple as changing your name.
At a legal level, some amount of friction makes sense; changing your identity can be a tool to evade a contract or debt. But there's even a cultural "how dare you be so vain" attached to changing one's name.
Kat
@roadriverrail The idea of having a name for each context appeals to me, quite strongly.
Our culture does like to constrain people, doesn't it?
Kit Rhett Aultman
@KatS What's also absolutely batshit is that, at least here in the US, it's also still morally scandalous when you *don't* alter your name at appropriate times. My partner shocked my family when, at our wedding, she was announced at the reception under her own surname rather than my surname. She finds the idea a marital name repulsive, and I support that, but we had to make up a story about how it would confuse her publication history to change names to calm people down.
Kat
@roadriverrail Agreed on all counts.
There's also a widespread issue of conflating an identifier with the identity, along with an assumption that identities are atomic (because apparently none of us show different sides of ourselves in different contexts).
I prefer this emergent culture of embracing people however they are.
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