I was thinking about it while walking home. My name is masculine, but I don't think I'd care too much, lol, idk about in public but at worst I would probably just get mad and then forget a few seconds later. Pronouns? We have a problem. Old name? Not really.
I used to be a huge gay pride supporter, so now it's hard for me to convince my friends "lol jk guys i'm actually a girl" and yeah.
No matter what I do, I'll always hear someone say he or him.
or hear my birth name. [Joseph]
Some people call me Hoeseff.
It's kinda a nickname.
idk.
I'm used to it.
They don't anymore but when I first started transition they would f up all the time which pissed me off with a passion! Same with pronouns.
I dont hate my old names but I hate famely/friend calling me that,
I am happy they dont have to anymore.. -__-
At the moment I dislike it but I certainly don't hate them for calling me by my old name.
They have done so for the past 25 years and while I have had my whole life to come to terms with my gender identity it is a big and sudden change for them. I have to respect that and understand that my personality, my being has always been linked with my old name. It takes a while to change that.
HELL TO THE ->-bleeped-<- YES. It is the highest insult.
Anyone who uses that word is no friend at all.
I just stopped responding to my old name in any way.
Don't answer to it, don't look in that direction, no reaction at all.
pronoun slips don't happen in the present, but very occasionally if someone is talking about something that happened pre-transition it will happen.
I let it go, its hard for them to alter events on the fly.
It's irritating, but I've found that if I remind people that I don't want them to call me that, they usually apologize and make sure to actively call me Maya a few times (saying something out loud a few times is a great way to remember it). My family flat-out refuses, but they also know they can get away with it. Again, it's irritating, but it's just one of those things. Later on, I let myself be upset about it, away from them (preferably away from all people). I'm sure it will be much harder to handle so calmly once I start HRT, but for now, it's just one more bothersome thing.
Since I was ~ OK with my 'old' names: Axel, Michael, I just changed them to Axélle, Michélle in my new documents --- they can mispronounce the ->-bleeped-<- out of it and I don't give a hoot. :-)
A lot of folk prefer Michélle, that's just fine by me :-)
I put it more down to their lack of sophistication and education and not to being rude on purpose.
If they use the wrong pronoun I just don't bother much, mostly it's not by ill will either.
Often the local Blacks do that in any case to ggs, as the "he" and "she" is not in their language as it is in English.
99% I'm called ma'am or madam which is pretty fine, - now ain't it :-)
No need to get aggro is my take, if you call me boss it's fine, but please not "dude".
Also often male and female referred to like: "Oh, MAN!" or "Oh boy! that's so..." what ever.
These are just sayings and are used with any girl, woman, female so why should I get worked up about it?
I just ignore it --- though, IT DOES TAKE SOME PRACTICE :-)
HAPPY,
Axelle
I'm okay with my kids calling me dad, if that's what they want. That's a relationship I feel is up to them to define, not me. The only thing I ask is when we're out in public to please not refer to me in the masculine.
For the rest of the family and my friends, I have given them time to adjust. When I recently got together with family members I hadn't seen since before transition, everyone was great. Not even one slip. That was very cool and very much appreciated. But at the end of the gathering my ex walks up and sticks her nose in on the conversation. She's had plenty of time to adjust. Then she starts talking about me and it's all "him" and "he", over and over, even after she met my disapproving eyes. I decided right then and there it was time to end the friendship because I have suspected all along she has been doing this and that has made it very tough for my kids to adjust.
Has anyone else ever thought of abandoning everyone you knew and getting an entirely new social circle? I go out a lot and everyone has been good about calling me my new name, except my brother. Oh wow he is bad at it. It's really not his fault though, he's known me for 19 years and has called me this name for that long. It's hard to break old habits, they just die hard. I don't have a set new name so everyone just calls me the feminine version of my male name. Also, pronouns are super scary to think about because if someone I'm with were to slip up, WOW, that would be awful.
Julie Marie, your story is very bittersweet :( The bitter part is sad. It's good you ended that friendship.
I like being call by my new name alongside female pronouns (at least for the people I'm out to), and though I don't hate it to be call male name/pronouns I do dislike it.
Yes, I hate it.
Especially when they do it, just to get under my skin.
Heck yeah. Hate hearing it from friends, family, and total strangers. Never liked it.
As someone else said, I no longer answer to it. It's not my legal name anymore. Went by a gender neutral nickname for many years, but tolerated family still calling me the old name. So they did...surprise.
That's all in the past. My friends have actually been great about it. A few slip ups now and then, but not from refusing to make an effort. So they get gentle reminders.
Right now I'm trying to go slow. People using my old name makes me feel bad, but I have told everybody who met me as female that I don't expect them to change immediately. This is mostly because of my daughter, who calls me "mom" at least half the time.
Also, I don't really have a lot of family or friends in my life. I have such a disturbed kid, and I've struggled for a few years with PTSD myself. I'm just now starting to let people close to me again, and I've been introducing myself as Felix for awhile now. So usually if I hear my old name it has something to do with bureaucratic paperwork (government stuff, healthcare, school, etc). That isn't personal enough for me to care.
How do you pick a new name? Do you try to pick something similar to your old name like Chaz/Chastity, or do you have a special reason behind your new name?
Felix - Actually, I think paperwork-related old name usage is what upsets me the most because it's usually in the context of someone else having to find my name in a file or on a screen. They ask me what my name is and I have to be the one to use my old name.
mixie - It varies from person to person. I picked my first name because it's phoenetically similar and has a lot of meaning to me. My middle name is based partly on a meaningful pun and partly on pheonetic resemblance to my mother's maiden name. I'd explain in detail, but I think that level of personal information on the internet would be setting myself up for identity theft. :)
Don't do that! :o I think it is a very special thing. I recently was debating (Ok ok fighting) with an idiot on another website who insists on calling Chaz a she and says no matter what "she is biologically a woman." When I pointed out that gender is not biology and he and she are social constructs not biological terminology she basically ignored it.
I think it is very disrespectful not to use the appropriate gender and name for a transsexual. I don't get why people want to make a big deal of it. Comes across as willful and spiteful to me. :'(
Quote from: mixie on November 08, 2011, 01:04:42 PM
How do you pick a new name? Do you try to pick something similar to your old name like Chaz/Chastity, or do you have a special reason behind your new name?
I've thought of myself as Jane for most of my life, I chose the name almost 30 years ago so I can't remember my reasoning, i've never liked my first name or the feminine version of it but Jane is the feminine version of James (my middle name) so that may be why I chose it but as i've said that was so long ago I can't be sure.
mixie - I love that you've looked into transgender issues and what helps us feel comfortable in society, but a lot of people haven't. I don't think they're willfully being mean. They just don't know. Even after we tell people, they make mistakes. The main thing is that people are trying. Just think about how often you want people to treat you a certain way. Here we are as a class of people, not just wanting people to treat us a certain way, but getting it!
Of course, there will always be the people who go out of their way to disrespect us, but using the wrong pronouns is usually the least offensive thing they have to say about us.
I hated my birth name with a passion from the age of... birth? As far back as I can remember, long before I had a clue what transgender was, I hated it. The only people who still call me it are family members, and I'm pretty certain they do it only to spite me. Well... it works. Even friends who knew me well before transition have had no problem adjusting to the change, and extended family members who have known me from birth don't slip up, either.
If I ever got ma'am'ed (that's an interesting apostrophe conundrum), I think I'd either have a heart attack or laugh my ass off. It's been 2 1/2 years at least since I had any visible feminine features. Of course, it's always fun to watch people's faces when my mom introduces me as her daughter... still waiting for someone to suggest she check into the psych ward.
I not even know my boyfriend´s old name; never asked him.
Sometimes I feel it is gloomy for him to have lost something as personal as a name, even if it was a feminine one.
I tried and tried and tried and failed to find a useful name that was similar to my birth certificate name, so I just picked something that felt right. It was a pretty intuitive decision, not rational.
Lol I still don't have a middle name, though. I'm not keeping my current one. It's passed down to each firstborn female in my mother's family, and I could make it masculine but I'd feel slimy using it no matter what.
Quote from: mixie on November 08, 2011, 01:04:42 PM
How do you pick a new name? Do you try to pick something similar to your old name like Chaz/Chastity, or do you have a special reason behind your new name?
I looked at baby names pick a couple and tried them out each for a week (though I was only out to two people then), then pick the one I liked best.
I always hated my old name; I was pretty vocal about how I intended to change it before I even came out as trans. It's been ages since I introduced myself to anyone with my birth name, so it's just my family now using it. They're starting to come around now when they're actually speaking to me, but still use it all the time. I thoroughly dislike it but at the same time I never really identified with it (even when it was the only thing people called me it'd often take a moment for me to realize who they were referring to). It's definitely strange and annoying though.