I love to draw, I don't read as much as I should because a lot of my leisure time is spent on my sketches and projects, drawing is all I do some days. But I have a problem, before I came out as trans, my signature was my born female name. So for awhile now I've been signing my art as "Charlie". And since a lot of my sketches were disgustingly dark (one in particular was me nude sawing off my own breasts, drawn on a night when I was very upset, later I ripped it up), no one every saw them...because I kept them to myself. But with my recent change in mood my art has gone from dark to cheerful, but I still sign it as "Charlie". My mum and dad are fine with it because I am out to them. But the rest the family (i.e. aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, family friends) have no idea who "Charlie" is. So when my mum wants to show my grandmother something, she'll see the signature at the bottom and go "who's Charlie?". This also could be seen as a dilemma for writers too, who want to use their chosen name for the gender they truly are. Has anyone else faced this?
Charlie shouldn't be so much a problem... it's a name applied to both genders (at least around here) Either male, or , female as a shortening of charlotte.. I had a female friend everyone called charlie, its fairly accepted around here and plenty of artists/writers use a different name for their work. So I guess you could explain it that way if you didnt want to tell the truth.
Hokusai used a lot of different names on his work. Some people just use different names from the names they were given at birth to sign their artwork. And I agree with srslywtf. I've heard Charlie used as both a girl's and a guy's name.
I find Charlie's a good gender neutral name. You could always pretend it's short for Charlene. But I feel you. I'm a writer and I'd like to publish with a male pen name. For now, I've been using my legal name, which I've used for years. Gravitating towards gender neutral should I publish anything before I'm out of the closet.
Well, here's a potential work-around tactic: some writers have pen names. I do, for instance. You could explain that you have an 'artist name', which would be a pen name... but for visual art. Of course, in actuality, it'd be your actual name. But if you don't want to tell your grandma... that is an option.
I've known people to use multiple different names. Each name was typically associated with a different type of genre (using you as an example, Charlie on the darker stuff, NameB on the cheerier stuff, and so on). Personally, i use a different name for drawing, for writing, and for discussion boards and the like, just because I like some anonymity, which is hard to come by in this era. As far as your grandma goes, you could always say you put down "Charlie" so if this person or that found it/saw it without your permission, they wouldn't know who's it was.
