My name is difficult. All my life, it’s been mispronounced, misheard, misspelled. It’s such a common experience that I’m surprised and impressed when it’s represented correctly. When my name is used incorrectly, there’s a way in which I feel incorrect, like my presence is not fully accounted for.

We all have stories about our names and, whether they are difficult or common, our experiences with them help cultivate our identities. For people with names that do not subscribe to English language convention, like writer Durga Chew-Bose, the experience of feeling like an outsider due to the treatment of a name represents a belittling of an “essential sense of self.”

It was perhaps with this acknowledgment of the effect of a name that I found myself defending the correct spelling of bell hooks’ name, which I recently included in a profile I wrote about a comedian. The experience was strange — though I argued with editors about the basic fact of respect and the troubling imposition of capitalization and even sent them links to style guides and other publications that have all honored the correct spelling, they stubbornly believed that their conception of “reader clarity” and “stylistic consistency” superseded the proper presentation of a prominent philosopher’s name.

Eventually, dissent culminated to a point it should have never reached and the editors made the right decision to present hooks’ name accurately — but not without reprimanding and patronizing me for posting publicly about the plain fact of the error and the clear embarrassment I felt as the named author of a piece that meant a lot to me and included this egregious oversight.

We all have stories about our names.
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The misrepresentation of hooks’ name amounts to a misrepresentation of, and disrespect for, the educator as a person. That the decision to respect a person by invoking the correct spelling of their name turned into a heated debate perplexed me, though it really shouldn’t have, given that language has always been a site of domination. The experience was a clear embodiment of the exercise of white privilege at a basic systemic level, and it revolved around a writer and thinker whose work seeks to dismantle that very thing. The irony was transparent. (Not to mention the additional irony that lies in the fact that my profile was about the importance of language.)

No matter the reason for hooks’ decision to lowercase her name (according to her Berea College biography, she claims this spelling is meant to draw more attention to her work than who she is), featuring her name incorrectly amounts to a distortion of her identity.

And to distort an identity in the name of grammar is to distort an identity in the name of an imposed convention that has silenced cultures and communities for centuries.

Fundamentally, the power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our individual and social identities. In many cultures, including the West, the act of naming exhibits dominion or power over something or someone. Examples abound in stories found in mythology, religion, folklore, film, and fiction.

In Greek mythology, invoking the name of the god of the underworld, Hades,summons the god. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God names light into being and Adam is tasked with naming the animals of the world in order to exercise man’s dominion. In the Gospel of John, we find the introductory verse naming the Word as God. In fact, A Russian dogmatic sect called the Name Worshippers (heresy according to the Russian Orthodox Church) claim to know that God exists because God can be named. And according to the Kabbalah, the name of every creation is its life-source.

Many stories in popular culture are also rife with powerful name themes. For example, in the Germanic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin and the 1988 film Beetlejuice, plot is bound up in the way names break a spell or summon a presence. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale and film Spirited Away, young women are enslaved, the domination inscribed in the act of naming.

One of the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language is bound up with power and the exercise of dominance is the practice of European colonizers attacking, defiling, and altering African names in order to suppress and erase African identity. For slaves, names encompassed their identities as individuals but also aided in the survival of a collective history. Despite this erasure, one of the ways in which enslaved and free Africans sought to preserve culture and identity was through naming. In “Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture,” Lupenga Mphande writes that, “The movement for re-naming and self-identification among African Americans started at the very dawn of American history.”

The violence with which name, identity, and colonialism is embedded with slavery is exemplified in the novel and film, Roots, wherein the protagonist Kunta Kinte seeks to retain his birth name at the expense of extreme physical and psychological abuse. First shown on television in 1977, it had a significant impact upon naming in the African American community. As Richard Moore writes in The Name ‘Negro’ — Its Origin and Evil Use, “when all is said and done, slaves and dogs are named by their masters, free [people] name themselves.”

In fact, the history of the English language has always been tied to power and patriarchy. This is most keenly illustrated in the following etymologies, tracing female-centered words back to roots which define women by their relationship to men and how they are useful:

Female: Latin, femina, meaning fetus

Lady: Old English, hlaf dige, meaning loaf kneader

Girl: Old English, gyrlgyden, meaning virgin goddess

Woman: Old English, wifman, meaning female man

Male: Latin, mascul, meaning male

Boy: German, bube, meaning boy

Man; Old English, mannian, meaning man

Words are not merely names or parts of a sentence structure; they represent a dynamic of power relations. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are connected to our relationships. How we communicate language is a social process.

In Language and Power, linguist Norman Fairclough builds upon ideas of linguistic and ideological predecessors like Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault to assert that language is the primary medium through which social control and power is produced, maintained, and changed, and advocates for “critical language awareness.”

Fairclough writes:

“‘Critical language awareness’ is a facilitator for ‘emancipatory discourse’ . . . which challenges, breaks through, and may ultimately transform the dominant orders of discourse, as a part of the struggle of oppressed social groupings against the dominant bloc.”

Ultimately, for Fairclough, awareness of language and how it contributes to the domination or subjugation of others is the first step toward emancipation. Though language is not the only site of social control and power, it is the most immediate medium at our disposal.

The English language’s implementation as a homogenizing force and its “correct” use is intricately bound up with notions of colonialism. As bell hooks herself writes:

“Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear . . . in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance . . . We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular . . . There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.”

While the history of capitalization in English is obscure, the convention itself seems to be one with no clear function. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, it was customary to emphasize most English nouns with a capital letter. Personal names and proper names were indistinct from ordinary nouns, with the ultimate decision left up to the writer. It seems that typesetters and printers found the abundance of capitalization aesthetically and economically unnecessary, so, slowly over time, common nouns began to be written in lowercase while “important” nouns were italicized and certain proper nouns were capitalized.

Indeed, the arbitrariness of the convention only underscores the absurdity of imposing it onto a person’s name. Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist and professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, tells me, “Whoever says, ‘But the rule is, names get upper case initials’ hasn’t really thought it through: Names are a class of words whose ‘correct’ form is whatever the name’s owner says it is.”

Therefore, imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity as an African American woman and a scholar who seeks freedom through language and its resistance. Lisa Moore, professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin, bluntly explains, “To misname [bell hooks] by changing the capitalization of her name is to put racist and patriarchal values above the thoughtful decision and strategy of one of our foremost philosophers.”

Imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity.
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Imposing a convention or prescriptive onto language disregards the fact of its inevitable evolution and represents an attempt to colonize it in some way. Of linguistic prescriptivism, Nicholas Subtirelu, assistant teaching professor in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University, writes, “Within the field of linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics), prescriptivists are generally seen as looking for a rationalization for their own attitudes toward others, which might include racist or classist attitudes.” Subtirelu believes that “prescriptivism” is worth practicing, but that it should be motivated by political or moral concerns. “We should not be policing others’ language for deviance from arbitrary rules. We should be policing others’ language for the way it represents the world and others in it.” For this linguist, there is only one prescriptivist commandment: “Thou shalt not use language to harm.”

Which bring us to our current moment, one in which people are policing language for the ways in which it represents the world and the people in it, the ways in which it perpetuates or dismantles power which subjugates and dehumanizes. Some are asking for more responsible use of language while others are decrying “political correctness” gone rogue; some are irresponsibly over-policing, while others are irresponsibly sputtering; some even believe that First Amendment rights are being violated because real consequences are the result of careless and disrespectful language.

There is no “correct” language, only thoughtful and careful language. Language informed by its history. Compassionate language. Language which invites rather than excludes. Language which, most importantly, evolves. “Correct” implies there is only one way for language to be, that language is prescriptive. But language is malleable; it evolves because we are malleable and we evolve. Even the existence of the term “politically correct” and its pejorative use embody exactly the opposite of what thoughtful and generous language is about and what it seeks to accomplish.

At a time when a serious presidential candidate wields cowardly language so flippantly and disrespectfully without any regard for the people he is demeaning or emboldening, fighting my editors for spelling hooks’ name correctly felt all the more imperative. What kind of hope remains if we can’t even get the language right?

Sensitivity to language is responsibility to language, and respect for its power to call forth whatever is summoned by its use. The effects of language matter. We can start by speaking to each other by the names that we choose.

When I shook Leigh’s hand, the first thing I thought was, “He seems wise.” Maybe because he looked poised next to my gracelessness. Shaking his hand was an ordeal. In one hand, I carried a folder containing the interview prompt questions and a consent form for him to sign. In the other, an old school tape recorder—and a pen and a pad, in case the tape recorder finally succumbed to old age.

The first thing I asked was whether Leigh would be okay with my recording our interview. I wanted to have an authentic conversation instead of frantically scrawling everything he said.

He paused. Then he said, “Sure, but I didn’t write any prompts for myself, so I might struggle to articulate some things.” It confirmed my initial perception of him as precise, careful to say exactly what he meant.   

I was interviewing Leigh for The Story of My Name Project, which I coordinated from 2014-2015. The project began as part of my job at FreeState Justice, a nonprofit offering free legal services to low-income LGBTQ Marylanders—including name change services. The call for participants was vague; it asked transgender or non-binary people who had gotten legal name changes if they wanted to participate in a project that celebrated their lives. If they were interested, they could email me.  

And emails came. From people who had gotten legal name changes, but also from people who hadn’t. A transgender woman who kept her birth name. A trans man who had been going by a chosen name for years, but never legally changed it. The mother of a transgender teenage boy.

Each one taught me a little more about the inherent power in claiming a name.

Leigh is transmasculine; he injects testosterone into his muscles so that his appearance will align with his gender. But when he got his name changed to Leigh, he chose the female spelling.

“The name Leigh was traditionally male, until it recently gained popularity as the female spelling of Lee—the female spelling of a gender-neutral name,” he said. “I like how that experience of gender plays out in myself, because I’m read as male almost 100% of the time, but I didn’t want to go with a name that’s unequivocally male.”

At the time we spoke, Leigh was learning not to knee-jerk reject any femininity within himself.

“I associated such negative things with my femininity: times that I had been victimized, times that I had been abused, times that I had been made to feel not good enough. But that’s not all there is to being female. Why should my femininity be something I hate or fear, something I exorcise from my being completely?… I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.”

Leigh named himself after a woman who was important to him when he was young, whose strength he admired. He said she had been able to help other people, even while she herself was struggling.  

I don’t want to perform a caricature of masculinity. That isn’t me.
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This name has a history of being used as both a girl’s and a boy’s name; Leigh spells it the now-female way—but when one says it out loud, the difference is undetectable. It also has personal significance. To capture such complexity in a name feels like an art.

Monica had known she was trans since she was a child in the ’50s—before there was a word for it. In the ’60s, she ran away from home. “I needed rebellion,” she said. “I never would have transitioned without rebellion. It’s how I found out there was something besides what I was taught growing up, in church and at home.”

For many years, Monica was trying to name what she’d always known on a non-verbal level. But she kept going back into hiding. She tried to be “the perfect man” in her romantic relationships. She got involved with drinking and drugs.

When she got sober, she did so in a men’s recovery house. While there, she kept hearing the name “Monica” in her head. She thought pushing it away would help her stop drinking and drugging; if she could just make it go away, all her problems would go away, too. But sobriety was what brought her out of hiding.

“What I didn’t know was that the more I worked on myself, the more I would find out about my true self,” she said. “In recovery, they talk about peeling away the layers. I was peeling away the layers.”

One night out after the recovery house, her friend made her up. When the friend asked what she thought, her answer was one word: Monica.

When you call a person’s name, you conjure them; their essence is supposed to be contained in that one word. Of the dozens of people I interviewed, no story is the same. For some, like Leigh, the process of choosing a name was more cerebral. Others tried on a few names until one felt right—a more intuitive decision. Another person, Angela, chose her name because as a kid she drew pictures of angels for her mom: “They were the one feminine memory from my pre-transition self.”

But one thing was consistent: Most people knew themselves enough to know exactly why their name fit. Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge. Perhaps in some cases the process of choosing a name helped people understand themselves. In others, choosing a name was a chance to honor what they already knew—an articulation of self.

In Iceland, they generally use a formula to name babies. Siblings’ last names can be different based on their assigned gender. If a baby is assigned female at birth, for instance, her last name is her dad’s name, followed by the word “daughter.” Both first and last names are usually gendered. Names must only contain letters from the Icelandic alphabet.

The Icelandic Naming Committee approves or denies names, and determines whether given names not used before in Iceland are acceptable. If the naming committee allows it, transgender people—if their gender falls within the binary—can change their name to be more aligned with their gender.  

Stories about chosen names are often stories of self-knowledge.
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In America, parents can give their kid any name. Often, they pick a name before they even meet the baby—let alone know who the baby will be. Grey, who I interviewed for the project, said, “You need something to be called when you’re born—but it’s a big deal for your parents to pick this thing that is going to be such an important part of your life and your identity. It’s a big thing for someone else to decide for you.”

I was given the name “Tyler” at birth, but I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect name. I’m non-binary, assigned female at birth, and was always put on boys’ little league teams as a kid based on the name alone. In early 2017, after years of wearing binders, I got top surgery. Hair grows on my cheeks, neck, and chest. This is from Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and “abnormally high”—according to one endocrinologist—testosterone levels.

Thirteen years ago, I stopped taking the spironolactone (anti-androgen medication) I was prescribed. I like the ritual of shaving my beard in front of the mirror. I liked when a cis male former roommate and I shared a shaving ritual. I like choosing how much facial hair I have at a given time.

I buy most shirts in the boys’ section. Usually when I go to a fancy event, I wear a suit and tie. But I like feeling pretty. I most often wear women’s pants. Occasionally I wear eyeliner, and even more occasionally, mascara. I feel like a slightly femme man, who is a woman, but not. Not all non-binary people think about or express their gender this way—there’s a huge, wonderful range.

Most strangers who aren’t aware of the nuance call me “ma’am.” Most queer strangers ask my pronouns.

“Tyler” fits. Even the cadence of my name, the way it sounds when it comes out of peoples’ mouths—like some people said during their interviews, just feels right.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right. All I did was emerge from the womb.  

Before I entered undergrad, my school “mistakenly” roomed me with a boy. My senior year, when my school actually did begin to offer gender-neutral housing, a cis male friend and I lived together for a few months. But then residential life attempted to take it back, insisting they’d thought I was a boy because of my name. They’d been confused. I thought: “Me too.”

Transgender women are mistaken for boys at birth; they are usually given boys’ names and put on boys’ teams. The fact that something feels off about this is often informative.

Mine is the opposite story, in a way. People would always apologize for putting me with the “wrong” roommate or on the “wrong” team. But I’m not sure what the wrong team would mean.

While working on The Story of My Name Project, I got an email from a trans woman named Tyler, who had been given the name at birth and chosen to keep it. She didn’t know if her story was appropriate for the project, but when she was coming out as trans, she wished she’d seen a story about keeping a name that fit. 

Along with sharing my excitement about my connection to her story, I told her that it was very appropriate; the project had evolved to become more about the importance of having a name that fits, not solely about legal name changes. Hers fit, even if she didn’t have to change it to get there.

Sometimes I felt guilty interviewing people who had to go through an arduous process to find a name that felt right.
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I came to learn the many, layered reasons Tyler’s name resonated. Growing up, Tyler’s parents had been horribly abusive. She said they used the name Tyler as code for “be a man.” But Tyler had known and admired a girl with the name since middle school; she said she would often look at her and think, “If I were a woman, my name would still be Tyler.”

It was not up to Tyler’s abusive parents to decide what the name meant. As she put it, “The name belongs to me, and it always will.”

In Ancient Egypt, people kept their real name secret; it was believed that if someone learned your real name, they’d have power over you. A version of this belief exists in many cultures, legends, and traditions—throughout the world and throughout history.

In the story of Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin is defeated when the miller’s daughter learns his real name. In The Odyssey, Odysseus is careful not to reveal his true name to the giant, calling himself a word that means “nobody.” Later, when he does reveal his name, it plays a role in his downfall.

There is a belief in the western world, though it’s hard to pinpoint where it originated, that if you can name something, it loses power over you.

If knowing a true name is powerful, then naming yourself is giving yourself a kind of power. Not the kind of legends, where your power lies in having a leg up over someone else. The empowerment in saying, “This is me.”

By Alaina Leary

Content Note: Rape, Sexual Assault

This story originally appeared on Narratively, a digital publication and creative studio focused on ordinary people with extraordinary stories — get thee to more amazing tales on the new face of adoptive parents, a series on paperless people, and clandestine love.

A s I heard my bank’s customer service representative repeat my first name over and over while trying to help me solve my minor issue, I hated the way the two syllables sounded. It almost hurt my ears.

“I’m going to put you on hold for a minute, okay, Lisa?” the representative asked me in a cheerful voice, hoping to reassure me that they were handling the situation. “I’m just going to speak to my supervisor and see what we can do about resolving this for you Lisa.”

“Yes, okay,” I said through gritted teeth, holding my cell away from my face and turning on the speaker function so I could grab a glass of milk and breathe a few times before she returned, hopefully with news that she could waive the newly implemented monthly checking fee. I wanted to call through the phone, “Can you stop using my name, please?”

People generally love having their first name used when they’re in a conversation, but I flinched when mine came up. When I hung up the phone, I opened up a Facebook tab and changed my first name from “Lisa” to “Alaina,” a name I’d recently joked to my girlfriend about taking as my own.

Once the change was finalized, I panicked. No one would understand what I’d done. How would they find me? Should I think about this first? Facebook’s policy wouldn’t allow me to change my name back to the old one, so I was stuck writing an explanatory post letting everyone in my life know that I’d be socially and legally changing my first name.

This wasn’t the first time I’d considered changing my name. I brought it up to my mom when I was around seven years old, and I explained to her that I didn’t like my first name and I wanted her to let me change it. I never ended up doing that. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, when I survived a rape at an on-campus college party, that the change felt necessary. It was no longer about feeling like my name didn’t fit or not liking the sound of its pronunciation — this was about survival.

It was no longer about feeling like my name didn’t fit or not liking the sound of its pronunciation — this was about survival.
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Even though I was only semi-conscious during the assault, I remembered distinct parts of being raped: My rapist’s hands around my throat, looking up at the ceiling above her twin XL bed, the sound of “Save Tonight” by Eagle-Eye Cherry playing faintly in the background, the empty bottles of UV Blue and Captain Morgan on my rapist’s dresser, and her voice as she repeated my name in a low rumble, almost like she was trying to lull me into complacency.

After the rape, my name felt like a reminder of the assault, particularly when it was used in romantic and sexual contexts. Even professors calling on me in class and customer service representatives verifying my information sometimes made me dissociate; it felt almost like I’d left my own body and was watching myself through a camera lens or from underwater or in a hazy dream. I was never officially diagnosed, but my therapist in college and I talked about the possibility that I have PTSD from the assault. I had a panic attack at the first college house party I went to after it happened, because seeing my female friends drunk off cheap liquor in red cups with guys touching their butts without asking made me wish the world would open up and swallow me whole.

When someone who looked like my rapist, all freckles and red hair, bumped into me on a city bus, I almost started crying. And I’d be in the midst of making love with my partner when the sound of her sensual voice crying out my name would leave me shaking, gripping her back tightly with my nails and trying to pretend I could fight the instinct to hide. We’d always been into role playing in bed, but I requested acting as someone else more times than I can count after my assault just because I didn’t want to hear my name said during sex.

Just over two years after I was raped, changing my name felt like a logical next step in overcoming my trauma. I’d made the conscious decision to work on my reactions to sensory impressions like sounds, noises, and imagery that I associated with the assault, and I could now blast “Save Tonight” in my 1998 dark green Buick Century to drown out the sound of Western Massachusetts potholes scraping my tires without even a brief nod to the March night when I was assaulted.

I could drink UV Blue and Captain Morgan at any college party I went to without hesitation. I still wasn’t exactly comfortable with someone else’s hands on my neck, but that was a trigger I wasn’t eager to break. My name was the final frontier. No matter how much practice I had enjoying consensual romance with my girlfriend, who was respectful and looked to me for guidance, I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that hearing my name brought.

Rachel Kazez, therapist and founder of All Along — a Chicago-based organization that helps patients find appropriate mental health care — says that a name change, whether legal or social or both, can be a powerful tool for survivors. “During a trauma, someone’s agency is very quickly taken from them. Getting that sense of control back is really important,” she says. “If there’s a trauma that occurs where the perpetrator was using the person’s name, they might want to go by a nickname or use a middle name instead.”

Kazez explains that survivors need to remember that a name change or another quick and dramatic change won’t fix the trauma or erase what happened. As long as the survivor is working on healing long-term, however, a name change can be an aspect of that process. “Our name is one of the first things we use to introduce ourselves to people,” she says. “It’s about control, choice, and reclaiming yourself.” Kazez also believes that the drastic shift involved in a name change — suddenly going by a new name — can mirror the suddenness of experiencing trauma, and might be particularly cathartic for some survivors.

When I first made the change, part of me hoped that adopting a new name would erase the night I was raped, and the memories associated with my rapist.
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When I first made the change, part of me hoped that adopting a new name would erase the night I was raped, and the memories associated with my rapist. “I think on some level I hoped the perfect name would unlock something for me, open a door away from myself into a safer place,” says Isobel O’Hare, a poet and essayist who changed her full name, first, middle, and last, during the middle of her MFA program after she survived childhood sexual abuse and adult abusive relationships. “I wondered what it would do to me to have this second name, whether I’d simply chosen another form of dissociation rather than dealing head-on with reality. Now I feel differently. I think choosing a name for myself gave me enough distance from the past to heal without becoming untethered. It was me claiming my own space and choosing my creative self over addiction and stagnation.”

Every time I did have to remind someone to call me Alaina, it was like asserting my consent in small daily situations: This is my name, and you’re going to call me by it. When my cousin and her husband visited from Texas, he struggled to get my name right at a family party at my aunt and uncle’s house. The first few times, I made eye contact and gently reminded him, “It’s Alaina.” He’d correct himself, use Alaina, and then a sentence later, make the mistake again. I started to teeter on the edge of panic, like I often did when people dead named me — used my former name without my consent — multiple times in a row.

So I focused on the grandfather clock in the corner of the room and made minimal eye contact, nodding and saying, “Mhm” instead of further the conversation. For the first year or so after the change, I wore a bracelet with my name on it every single day. That was my reminder that, no matter what other people said, my name was my choice. I looked at that bracelet every time he slipped up. I wasn’t rude, but I didn’t give him any open opportunities to use the wrong name.

The next time he saw me, several months later, he started the conversation by calling me Alaina and didn’t make a single mistake.

The first few weeks and months of my social name change were the rockiest. As resolute as I felt — I sent in the required legal paperwork within a week of making the choice — it felt impossible to get people I’d known for years to break their habits. I was exhausted by constantly reminding people, “It’s Alaina now,” and re-introducing myself every time I ran into a former classmate, old friend of the family, or distant relative. My short explanation felt paltry in comparison to the magnitude of this decision: “I guess it’s been awhile since I’ve seen you, but just to let you know, I made the decision to change my name to Alaina in June of this year. I’ve never felt comfortable with my old name, and I would really appreciate it if you can call me Alaina going forward. I’m happy to remind you politely if you’d prefer.”

Sana Chandran, a licensed clinical psychologist in the Bay Area of California, changed her last name after surviving family trauma when her father stole her identity and had an affair outside of his marriage. “I needed to emotionally and legally distance myself,” she says. She took her mother’s maiden name. “Even though it broke my father’s heart, I had to remain true to myself and carry a name that I was most proud of. I feel good about my choice.”

I was lucky that none of my friends or family members objected to my name change. It took my dad a few days to adjust, but after we had a discussion about how hearing my name was difficult for me, he was willing to try his best.

I Am Not A ‘Rape Victim’ — I Contain Multitudes

“I was worried that my classmates would think I was pretty self-absorbed to expect them to start calling me something completely different,” O’Hare says. “I was surprised when they not only adopted the new name, but did so with great joy like they were traveling with me on an important voyage.”

One of my best friends, Krista, is a soft-spoken introvert whose life is often defined by habits, such as how she leaves her house at exactly the same time every day in order to be “the right amount of early” to her obligations. “I’ve been practicing your name,” was one of the first things she told me when she saw me after my announcement. “If I slip up, I’m really sorry. I’ve been repeating it to myself for weeks.” She didn’t make a mistake once.

As the years passed, fewer and fewer people referred to me by the wrong name, and when it did happen, it was so occasional that it didn’t ignite a floodgate of panic exploding inside me, it didn’t make me dissociate to escape painful memories of my assault. Watching my friends and family get it right — and seeing them correct others, like when one of my best friends, Desiree, a future attorney who respected my legal decision the moment I announced it, would assertively remind her forgetful Portuguese mother that she can’t call me “Lisa” anymore because that’s not my name — made my heart sing.

After a period of adjustment, my name no longer feels like a proclamation of reclaiming my consent or my identity, it just feels like who I am.
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Initially, I worried that my name change wouldn’t change my life, and in many ways, it didn’t. After a period of adjustment, my name no longer feels like a proclamation of reclaiming my consent or my identity, it just feels like who I am. And hearing my former name doesn’t often fill me with dread; instead, I’ll stare blankly and forget to respond because I hear “Lisa,” and think, “Who are they talking to?”

Read more great tales over at Narratively.