I changed my entire name, mainly because I did not want to leave any clues for my family. I wanted to cut them off as completely as possible. Same old story, I guess.
I liked that my birth name was very unusual, but it was feminine (well, my middle name was unisex but tending toward feminine). I have always loved my birth surname because it's very uncommon and cool, although it did wreak all sorts of havoc on people who couldn't spell it or pronounce it. And, of course, my surname was really my father's gift to me...for a long time, I wanted to maintain that tie because I have a daddy-son fixation (don't ask; I'm sure it all goes back to the father-son relationship that I never had).
But the unusualness of my last name would have made me very recognizable, no matter what I took as my first name. And it didn't go well with any of the first names that I came up with. So I went through a phase during which I tried to come up with a whole new name with the same initials as my birth name. That didn't work, and I was a bit nervous about having the same initials anyway. I figured that if my parents ever tried to find me, they might take those initials as a sign that they were on the right track.
Eventually, I came back to my alter ego from high school. I used to write a lot, and this alter ego was sort of a replacement for my imaginary friend, who had left me a few years earlier. I was writing a science fiction novel about my alter ego, and I took his name as a nickname in my senior year. More than fifteen years later, I took that name as my legal name, although I made a couple of changes to distinguish myself from the character in the book. First, I took a different middle name that alludes to my FTM origins. And second, the character in the book was always known by a diminutive version of the first name--a shortened version with a "y" added on. But I never, never use a diminutive of my first name, and it drives me nuts when other people try to do that.
I went from a strange and unusual surname to one of the commonest surnames in the country. Call it protective coloration.
All of this came to nought one day when my father unexpectedly came by the place I worked. I had worked there for ten years but had changed my name only a few months before. I was getting ready to quit so that I could sever the last ties to my old life and so that I could go to graduate school...and my father came by to drop off a Christmas gift. He hadn't done that in several years, so I wasn't expecting him to do it again. Naturally, he asked for me by my old name. The receptionist, who was relatively new, had no idea who that person was, and my father was about to leave. Then one of my coworkers, who happened to be passing by, blurted out that I had changed my name. She told him the new name without thinking.
It's hard to blame her; as I said, she wasn't thinking. I was nice about it. But some of my other coworkers were saying, "Gee, I can't believe you did that!" She was mortified, poor thing.
My parents seem to be abiding by my wishes. They have not bothered me again.
I will not change my name again. My name is my chosen name. Every syllable, every symbol, every double meaning. All of it is MINE.
The birthday gift was a piece of poetic irony: a framed keepsake "name origin" print. My original given name was featured prominently at the top, followed by the name's origins and meaning and a prose poem about what kind of person the name supposedly describes. I cannot imagine what my father must have felt when he left it for me, knowing that I had cast off that beautiful, carefully chosen name to take on something strange and masculine. But I still have the print, along with the handwritten note that my father left for me that day. It was probably my mother's idea, not my father's, to get that particular gift, but I guess I will keep it, and his note, till I die.
So it seems that I haven't quite cast off all of my past, have I? A few things I do hang onto.
