Ill-Fitting Clothes: Names as Gifts and What We Do with Them

Names are most often bestowed upon us in advance of or shortly after our birth, reflecting familial and cultural legacies and expectation as well as the tastes of those doing the naming. But sometimes the gift of a name is something that feels tight at the seams, restrictive in how it is prescriptive and out of line with one’s sense of self and subsequent experiences. What does it mean, then, to reject that gift and choose your own name, your own highly personal identifying marker, while you navigate the expectations of yourself and others? What do people assume about our names because of our perceived positionalities, and likewise, what do people assume about us personally based on our names? I chose my first name at age fifteen and settled on my middle name at twenty-one, casting aside the ill-fitting and restrictive clothes of my birth name to reflect myself as an agender individual navigating a world dominated by binary understandings of sex and gender. In this essay, I take apart the names I chose for myself, and the names others choose to call me, and reflect on the power held in naming and being named.