LGBTQ+

I am cis, but my given name was very aged for my generation and grandmotherly which made me self-conscious as a kid.

When I decided to ditch my name, first I tried using my middle name, but that starts with a different letter and it turns out my brain tunes that out entirely if someone that I wasn't already listening to calls it out. I had to already be engaged in conversation with someone to respond to it, which doesn't work great if someone across the room calls out your name to try to show you something cool. My parents never did the full name scolding so I literally almost never have heard my middle name spoken aloud. My dad even thought I had my deceased sister's middle name the last time I can remember middle names coming up in discussion.

I gave up on the name change for a couple of years, but in high school I decided to give something else a shot. I started using my first initial, but spelled phonetically, for example: K spelled as Kay or L as Elle. That was the solution I needed. If someone shouts it from across the room, my brain alerts just like with my full first name. It's simple, but it works. I've stuck with it for 23 years now.

I highly recommend picking something that has a starting sound similar to your current name so your subconscious brain will still pick up on it, otherwise your friends and family will be shouting your new name over and over to get your attention while you are completely oblivious. My kid is trans and I am going through this now from the opposite end of calling the new name out repeatedly with no response because he also picked a name with no similarity to his given name.

I used to play a ton of online RPGs with a strong focus on actually roleplaying and I pretended I was a girl named Alia. So I'm kind of surprised I never considered that name when I actually came out. In my 20s I started hanging out with an older transwoman who was kind of like my mentor, and she named me Shauna. I ended up back in the closet for about 15 years, but when my egg cracked again a couple of years ago I floated a few options to my partner which the same first initial as my deadname, and she didn't like any of them except Shauna, and to be honest I also liked Shauna the best.

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved the video game series Thief, where curse words are often replaced with the word taffer. I chose it as my username, but then it stuck as my actual name when I later came out. Most people just assume I'm related to the guy from Bar Rescue and not that I'm a big fan of a stealth game from the 90s

Just thought about different names and the one I later chose somehow just felt good

Not trans but more genderfluid I guess. I have this alter ego and I got her name by finding the closest conventional name to my online nickname. And the full name version is hella cute which helps me to feel more fem. Anna and Annabelle.

I really wanted a name that starts with the letter 'M' because it just felt right. I then looked up "nonbinary/genderneutral names that start with the letter M" I found one with a slight association with my deadname

I had a little Lalafell boy in FFXIV named Cocozan Cozan.

When I switched to femroe I changed the last name, truncated the first to Coco.

People knew me as Coco and she/her online and it felt right. Decided to keep the name for myself.

I looked for astronomy-related names, and ended up choosing the name of an asteroid ((2) Pallas)

I wanted my first name to be something easy for my family to adjust to, and chose my middle name because it spoke to me. Now I've learned my middle name is a family name, and my family and all my friends call me by my middle name, so my first name is relegated to official business only. It is a convenient way to identify scams very quickly :)

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 mostly just had some rules for names I wanted to avoid: names of people I knew personally, names that sound weird/unusual in english or swedish (where I'm from).

I considered a bunch of names via the usual methods like baby name lists and random name generators but didn't find one that felt right for me, until one day one just occured to me

My name (Diamond) mostly came from my username. I used to be more active talking on Discord, so a lot of my friends would call me based on my username. It was weird at first, but I got used to it! Some people found it surprising, but the reactions aren't too bad.

I've read it somewhere and it stuck a chord in me. I started to recognize it everywhere and it just slowly dawned on me that it's my name is guess 😅

I've always had a list of names I liked for several purposes but when I heard the name I chose for myself, I became completely obsessed with it and was sad it wasn't my name. But then I realized there was no reason it couldn't be XD

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.