Picrel is Witherhoard

I came out in middle school. Everyone asked me if I was picking a new name and I said no. I don’t know if that was the right decision. In hindsight, I could say I wasn’t ready and I would’ve chosen a bad name. Or I could say it would’ve saved me from having my given name on my high school diploma, pilot license, and EMT license. Counterfactuals are pointless thought exercises anyway.

My given name is derived from the French word for beloved. It’s a rare name. I have never seen anyone else with my name. It’s derived from my Chinese given name (Xuan/萱) and my mother’s family name. It doesn’t sound feminine, but the way it’s written out and spelled makes it a distinctly feminine name. When people asked why it was Like That, I said it was because it was Chinese. Which was half-true. It was rare enough that I could get away with passing it off as ethnic.

I tried Lin. Lin was derived from my given name, what my middle name represented, and my mother’s surname. I went by this for a while, but Lin is fundamentally a surname in Chinese. It wasn’t masculine enough. And it didn’t feel right.

I tried Zack. Zack was a hard, masculine name I ripped from the “Zack, stop” vine when I was in middle school, and I tried it, and it remains my EVE Online main character’s name to this day. But it didn’t feel right. Wasn’t inspiring enough.

I haven’t asked my parents what they would’ve named me in English if I had been born male. I don’t want to write my story assisted by the people that tried to palimpsest it with the story of a girl that never existed. I asked them for input on renaming me from 萱 to 宣 (still pronounced Xuan), but my American identity is mine. I want to be its sole author.

My wingmates called me by my family name. It was the first time a name had ever really suited me. It made me realize my given name came loaded with baggage I hadn’t noticed because I had always borne it. I thought that was fine. At the time, all my friends were military. They never used my given name. And when they did, it was rare. But it planted the seed of doubt. I learned how it felt to have a name that fit. And my given name didn’t. At the time, I figured I could go by my family name forever. 

The first and only person I’ve ever fallen in love with called me by my given name the most out of all the other cadets. I loved the way it sounded coming from him. He was the one that had inspired me to attempt to reclaim it, because he had pointed out that it rhymed with Berlin, and I enthusiastically rolled with it for years. 

I chose Alexander on a whim when I made a character that would come to be incredibly important to me. I had just become a cadet and for the first time in my life, I preferred reading about my own life to reading about other peoples’ lives. But I preferred writing in limited third person, and I wanted plausible deniability, so I came up with the stunningly uncreative Xander Bradshaw. Xander as a reference to Zack, and Bradshaw was ripped straight from Top Gun. I wrote about Xander going on adventures that were the same as or similar to mine, or set years in the future.

As cadethood handed me more and more responsibilities. Xander became even more blatantly a self-insert. Xander had been cis and vaguely white, but he became trans and Chinese under minuscule pressure. I eventually gave him my entire backstory. Xander was me. Just harder, better, faster, stronger. Until he wasn’t. I kept surpassing him. I had to keep updating his backstory to match mine to make sure he was at least as good as me. I was consistently beating myself at the game of life. When I lost my virginity, I scrubbed the many unrealistic fantasies I gave to him and replaced them with my reality. When I got dropped from ROTC, I made him get dropped too. I became an EMT? Yeah let’s throw that on his credentials list. 

Along the way, I started getting attached to the name Alexander.

I eventually renamed Xander Bradshaw to Alexander MySurname. I wrote extensive lore on why Xander chose the name Alexander, directly importing my rationale for why I would’ve chosen Alexander.

I liked Alexander, but it didn’t feel like something that could be me. It was too good a name. It was a name I could give a son- and I had given it to Xander’s imaginary son on several occasions. But it didn’t fit me. I had been thinking about adopting it since not long after creating Xander Bradshaw, but they were just fantasies. It was unrealistic. And too much paperwork and social humiliation when my given name worked fine.

A few weeks ago, I listened to “They Will Bury Me A Woman.” I couldn’t relate to it because I knew I would be buried a man. But something about it stuck with me. Some weeks later I got blackout drunk. I don’t remember anything from that night past a certain point, but I am fairly certain I ranted about being trans. 8 years living as a man and I’m still upset about this. But I guess it was a reminder that my transition wasn’t over and identity exploration never ends. I figured out why the song stuck with me. They will bury me under my given name. A feminine name, a name given to a girl that never existed. I have already sacrificed too much to live authentically to not sacrifice my given name too.

I don’t care that Alexander doesn’t fit me. I never thought I could become the kind of person that is a pilot, but here I am. I never thought being a cadet or EMT or gymrat or leader would suit me, but here I am. I have to grow into who I am. It’s like Miles Morales donning the mask. It’s a leap of faith.

So why Alexander?

\-so much aura

\-distinctly masculine name

\-timeless classic

\-versatile nicknames

\-looks vaguely like Xuan

\-the name of a lot of great men

\-it means protector of men

\-Alexander is the #12 most common name and Xander is in the top 300 most common names for my birth year, so it makes statistical sense to have been named Alexander

My primary argument against changing my name was that coming out again would be embarrassing, it would involve a lot of paperwork, and old traces remain on too many indelible things. But transitioning is already all of those things. One more way to transition wouldn’t hurt.

I just asked my mom about it and she seems ambivalent. I’m going to give my roommates/former wingmates the talk about calling me a new name tomorrow.



After 8 years of being stealth under my given name, I’m choosing the name Alexander and I’m blogposting about it to peer pressure myself into not chickening out.