Now that I have clothes that will suffice for passing and the kind of hair I want is in the mail, it's time to adopt a female name. I know it's an incredibly personal decision, but I welcome the involvement of the EC. I'd prefer to make this decision with input from others, and this is the most comfortable place. I want a name that matches my ethnicity, which means Irish, English, French, or German. It should go well with my surname. My surname was Anglicized when my great, great grandfather moved to the US from Ireland so that the family wouldn't be discriminated against, and when I do the legal name change I intend to change my surname back to the Irish form. I won't say what my Irish or Anglicized surname is to avoid breaking the forum rules on sharing contact information, but anything that sounds good with the name Hennigan will sound good with the Irish form of my surname. I like pretty sounding names, and while unusual spellings or rare names are fine, I don't want anything too out there.
You're right, this is deeply, deeply personal, so, yeah, I don't feel comfortable speaking to what your name should be. Buut, a couple recommendations: Pick a provisional name. Something cute and femme, but not TOO femme and *definitely* not rare or uncommon. You want to keep the attention drawing to a minimum. Go by that for a while, and wait. I honestly think...like, I feel like once you transition more into your female identity it WILL just come to you, and one day it'll be like "Ohh, I'm (blank)". This is more about heart and feeling than mind and thinking, imho. Now for me, I got lucky, cause I never actually chose the name Stefani within memory. It just always was...when I decided to transition, it was just Stefani. And my sister told me she remembered me sometimes calling myself that since we were reaaally little. All this is to say, I never picked the name, it picked me. And there were actually days when I hated it, but it was what I was stuck with, just cause, yeah...it should be something that naturally comes to you, as similar to the way as your birth name did, as possible. You don't want your name to be "handpicked" seeming..you want it to be authentically you.
I think you should check out a baby names site. You can look up names by number of syllables, starting letter, popularity by year, meaning, etc. Browse those, see what sounds good to you, find a meaning you think fits you or whatever just feels like you. It's, like you said, really personal. But you don't have to go in cold and just randomly pick one, you can do as much research as you need and the best place to start is a huge bank of names with all the attendant information.
Second vote for Paige. Not only is it that butter zone of femininity for me (not too little, not too much) but it makes me think of books. And that is VERY appealing.
I like the ideas of Paige and Erin. Both sound nice and are fairly neutral. As for books, I read voraciously, own FAR too many for my storage space, have cards to two public and three college library systems, and work in a library. Kelly would be good for the same reason. Unfortunately, the names Erin and Kelly are both taken by my friends. I do, however, wonder how important gender neutrality is. ---------- Post added 12th Oct 2013 at 11:50 PM ---------- I've found a few on the gender neutral side: Bailey Brook Sam Darcy Devin Robin I like them all. I think Sam stands out a bit because I want a longer, more feminine name, which Samantha fits well, but if a gender neutral name were important I could switch to Sam. I do very much covet some of those beautiful French feminine names, though.
I am heavily biased towards this name as it was that of my first ever kinda-sorta crush in elementary school. She moved away after only one or two years though, so I never got over her :/ It's a beautiful name in its own right though, and due to its shortening/masculizing ability, would be very useful to you.
The only other femenine name that can shorten into masculine that I can think of is Christina, which is too close to my mom's name.
I really like the name Grace right now, dunno why. Im usually very traditional with names! Maybe its cos i met a really nice girl at work called Grace... I do like the sam/samantha thingy too, sam is neutral and samantha is feminine.
I am not sure, but I think that if you want to go through transition in my country, you are advised to change your name twice. Once to a gender neutral one, then after meeting all legal requirements you can change it to the 'opposite' gender. Perhaps that's not a bad idea. You can also pick a name that has a personal meaning to you and will help you to become the 'new and better' yourself. It can be a name of the family member you admire, some of your ancestors, a book character - you get the idea. If your ancestors had traveled from Europe to America, they must have been very brave and not afraid of all the obstacles the new life would bring. Just like you
Corin and Paige are both really nice and strong names. If you want a beautiful and unusual name, think about Nannerl. It's German in origin, being a nickname given to Mozart's sister Marianne. However, I personally wouldn't choose it because nobody would know how to spell it!
