My original name has no male counterpart, so I nerded to forge something anew.

I made a large list of names of my language whose letter started with A (same letter as my old name), didn’t have a female counterpart and I liked the pronounciation. Then I risked off the names that only very old people used, which were 75% of the list. The remaining list was about eight names. “Abel” was the most common of them.

I noticed afterwards that my parents (if they weren’t transphobic cucks) would have liked this name. When I asked them how they picked my name, they said that they wanted it to start with A, be simple to write, short, with no variant spellings, beautiful, with a good meaning and not too common. Also, they’re christians.

Cis, just didn’t like my birth name because I don’t like the sound of it. Weirdly enough I’m fine hearing it said if you aren’t speaking to or about me. If you’re talking to or about someone else named [my birth name] it doesn’t bother me to hear the name at all.

Found my new name by going through baby name websites and writing down every name for girls that I liked. (I prefer to be very gender-conforming in my outward presentation and want my name to be so as well.) It was a very long list. Over time, I culled names from the list and ended up with two final choices. I forget how I decided between them, but what I can say is that during the entire process, I picked names based on how they sounded to me. After all, my grievance with my birth name is how it irritates me to hear it. I did not look up the meanings behind the names. They can be interesting, but my birth name had a perfectly fine meaning and that did nothing to endear me to it.

I chose my name when I was 12. I don’t remember exactly, but I hit on the name Audrey and I was like, “I really like that name”. Even back then in the year 2000, I knew I was trans, and so I decided to take the name for time being. It kinda stuck after years and years of being my true name. Unfortunately, I did not come out to anyone for over 20 years, so the only one who knew my name was Audrey was, well, me.

I didn’t really sit down and choose a name, it was given to me. Some friends started calling me by a shorter version of my deadname and I really liked the vibe of it, so I started going by it.

I wanted a science-based name because I’m a little nerd lol. I considered Kelvin at some point. In the end, (and I really can’t remember why I specifically chose it) I named myself after Edmond Halley – Hal as a nickname, as a reference to HAL 9000 of course.

Honestly, I sort of regret it, because Halley isn’t as gender neutral as I thought and everyone considers it a girl name. I wish I’d been more out there and straight up decided to call myself Truck or Brick or something.

They’re all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won’t go into detail since it’s generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was “the (opposing) version of [Name]” (eg “Francine is the feminine of Frank”).

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was ‘very gender’ (eg: if Frank were to mean “buff and hairy”), so it was confusing if the opposing version’s meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.

I stole my name from my kindergarten girlfriend lol