transing names
When we started making the queer/privilege podcast, I was going by the name Taylor, so the first several episodes have us using that name for me. At that time—and still, actually—my legal name was Derek Taylor Parrott.
I want to do three things with this post. First, I want to contextualize the use of Taylor in early episodes and my decision to not retcon it. Second, I want to talk about my experiences changing my names, especially in a world with so many digital instances of names and handles (I’ll also share a story about my names that I think is kind of funny). Finally, I want to talk a bit about deadnaming and how it feels having moved from my birth first name to my birth middle name to a chosen name.
This is up-to-date as of 25 November 2021, but I might update it as I go along.
don’t want to read the whole thing? jump to sections:
• taylor -> aster • dysphoria, euphoria, neutrality, and legality • feelings • resources •
taylor -> aster
When we started working on the q/p podcast in late summer of 2021, I’d already decided that my birth first name wasn’t a good fit. I’d been using Taylor since maybe mid-2020 and it felt better, overall. To be clear, though, Derek never felt bad; it just never felt right. I eventually realized that Taylor didn’t quite feel right either, but it felt like a safe, small step to take, and felt like an improvement.
I left my PhD program in December of 2019, and over the course of 2020 and 2021, I was able to do a lot of the self-figuring-out work that grad school hadn’t left me time for. I think that working on the podcast—having an explicit, dedicated space to think and talk about my queerness—also helped me move forward with things. So, by the time we’d recorded our first few episodes, I felt ready to make a change.
I’d been thinking about what name would be a good fit (not just a not-bad fit, like Derek and Taylor had been). I made lists. I practiced writing and saying names. I thought through fictional characters and important people in my life. I had my friends and partners try out different names in person and in chats. I played around with Morgan, Sammus, Kay… and a couple others. Kay is the middle name of my aunt who raised me and is basically most of my biological family. Morgan had some deep history with me and I liked it. I feel like I came closest to using it for a while, but ultimately didn't (obviously). Morgan came from my parents, actually. When my mother was pregnant with me, the doctors told them I was going to be a girl, and they were going to name me Morgan. Then I was born and had a penis and my father wouldn't go with Morgan. He thought it was too girly and would make me gay. My mother suggested Taylor, but my father had the same objection: "No, that'll make him gay." So, my father suggested Derek and they went with it. Spoiler: I was going to be gay as fuck no matter what they named me.
So I liked the way that Morgan felt like a reclamation. It felt like a taking-back of my "origin story" from my parents (who, for various reasons, I am not close with). And that felt good and powerful. But I ended up not wanting to frame my identity around "spite" or anything or even other people like that (or positively, like Kay). I wanted something that was more about me.
Aster, from Greek, “star”
Depending on which baby name website you look at, Aster can be a “girl’s name” or a “boy’s name”—sometimes it’s listed as unisex. I like the gender ambiguity of it.
It means “star” in Greek. It names the family of flowers including daisies and sunflowers. Some people on the internet relate it to the names Astrid or Esther, the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, or the pagan and Christian versions of Easter.
I came to it through an episode of a podcast. Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! did an episode about Asterion (or Asterius), the Minotaur of Crete in Greek myth. They talked about how the name of the Minotaur can be translated as “starry-eyed;” how the name often gets left out of stories in favor of the label, Minotaur (Minos’ bull). More importantly, to me, they talk about readings of Asterion as autistic (or as resonating with the experiences of autistic people). (they also mentioned a lovely and heartbreaking short story by Jorge Luis Borges.)
This resonated with me. A lot. I listened to this episode shortly after getting a tentative diagnosis which helped me understand myself and my experiences.
Stars have always been a Thing for me. I used to stargaze with my aunt, and then with friends. In college, I’d tipsily look up at the big dipper in awe. When I moved to Philly, I was distraught at the light pollution and lack of visibility.
dysphoria, euphoria, neutrality, and legality
I got to a point where Aster felt good, and felt accurate. So I talked to everyone and made an Instagram post and now I’m Aster. Given the topic of the podcast—and given the weirdness of names—I wanted to leave the instances of Taylor in the episodes we’d already recorded. I wanted to use this experience as an opportunity to chart the “journey.” I was worried about being confusing but I ended up deciding that it was messy and messy is real so I’m keeping it and we’re talking about it. Again though, this is because of my individual relationship to my names. This isn't necessarily best practice (best practice is to use the names people tell you to use and never deadname). This is an opportunity to make visible parts of a story that aren't always visible and talk openly about my experience.
I'm lucky. Seeing or hearing my birth name doesn't feel super dysphoric to me. I feel like I’m in a place where I think of it like my social security number: a government identifier assigned to me at birth that has little to nothing to do with my identity. (This is also why I'm not sure how much I care about legal name change.) Not all trans people feel this way. For many, their deadnames are a source of retraumatization. Even for trans people that feel neutral about their birth names, having that mismatch between identity and identifying legal documents can be a risk—sort of automatically outing them whenever they need to show identification. There's also been a lot of talk about this in the world of academia around retroactively changing published articles to reflect folks' actual names—here’s a good intro to the topic.
Like I said, I don’t think I'm in any great rush to make the name change legal, but I have been changing it in digital spaces and running into some roadblocks. Gmail, for instance. Despite changing my name to Taylor in all the places I can find in the Gmail and Google account settings, when folks get an email from me, it still lists the sender as Derek Parrott. And, of course, folks don't always read how I sign my emails or my signature, and then address me as Derek (even my therapist's admin staff have done this—not great). Of course it's easy to change on Instagram and on the queer/privilege website, because there's less back-end metadata stuff attached to those. I ended up just making a new Gmail (luckily there aren't that many Aster Parrotts taking up usernames).
feelings
In the Summer Storm tangents episode, I talk about the weird, messy, conflicting feelings around changing my name. One of the things I worried about was that this was the second time I’d changed: Derek to Taylor, Taylor to Aster. I felt like I was making people do extra work, again, and worried that people would see this as reinforcing that false narrative of queer—and especially trans—folks as confused, indecisive, or even worse, deceitful. Of course, I know that none of those things reflect what’s actually going on, but my anxiety here joins forces with the internalized anti-trans/anti-queer ideas I’ve been steeping in all my life to make me worry. What’s actually going on is that I’m working through the bits of culture that have made a home inside me and separating those out from what’s actually me and what I actually want.
It’s fucking hard work to figure out what aspects of yourself are “really” endogenous and what comes from the culture you grew up in. But it feels so good. And I think that it’s super queer to question what you’re given and learn more about yourself.
People change names for lots of reasons. Many cis people deal with name changes mostly in the context of marriage. Trans people often change their names to achieve a better fit between their name and their identity. We pick a name that fits us, rather than going along with the name that our parents decided when we were born. As one’s gender assigned at birth has little bearing on their actual gender, one’s name assigned at birth has relatively little to do with who one actually is. This isn’t true just for trans people. I kind of like the idea of everyone taking the time to figure themselves out and pick a name for themselves.
While I think there’s inherent value to this sort of experimentation, exploration, and play, I also think that we should normalize it for more practical reasons. Like I mentioned above, I worried about my changing and exploring; I felt self-conscious when I asked folks to try other names for me. I think that everyone—not just trans folks—should be encouraged to reflect on themselves and explore. It’s like how accessible design ends up benefiting everyone: if the cultural norm is reflexivity and exploration, then it’s safer for trans people to explore and cis folks also have space to get to know themselves better.
I know there’s also been a lot of discourse around the power of names and some idea of “true names” (see this episode of Our Opinions Are Correct about names for a good, trans discussion of this). I think there’s real power in finding and choosing a name that is yours and fits you, but I also think folks can get caught up in finding “the right” name, the “perfect fit.” I think the desire to find a name that feels better than one’s birth name combines with the cultural pressure to decide, which can make people feel rushed. It’s ok to try things on and change. It’s ok to identify strongly with a name or to just casually have a name that doesn’t make you feel bad. It’s ok to change it up, or have multiple names. Gender and sexuality can be fluid. People change over time. I know that I felt a pressure to find a name that reflected "who I really am” but an important part of who I am is a queer indeterminacy, a sense of exploration and play and experimentation. And I think that we, as a culture, should make more space for that kind of indeterminate play. I think it can help everyone grow.
