The first time I was asked this, it was by a nurse at the transsexual surgery centre in Delhi, India.
I assumed it had to do with me being transsexual. Something that the nurse would obviously know – me being there to check in for a sex change.
Most transsexuals are given a wrongly-sexed name at birth. So most of us (myself included) need to change it. I thought that “good name” was just a clever and endearing way to ask me what my preferred name was, even if I hadn’t had it legally changed.
But this wasn’t the case.
It turns out that “What is your good name?” is just the way that native speakers of Hindi (and Urdu) ask for your name. I looked it up later. In Hindi the word is “subh naam”, and it literally translates to “good name”. Apparently South Asian people often have multiple “names”, or honorifics placed in front of their names, such as a clan title. The “good name” is merely the first legal name of the person.
So, for the most case, in English it’s nonsense. People don’t have a “good” and a “bad” name.
But, as a person who grew up in a poisonous identity that was terrible for me – and do have a “bad” name – I quite like it. So let me take a little diversion here to talk about naming, the goods and the bads.
Names are important. Especially in as much as they’re gendered. Unless you’re lucky enough to have a truly gender-neutral name, like Taylor, your name is often the first thing that’ll tell people to expect either a woman or a man. (Even if you’ve got a name that can be made gender-neutral, like Danny/Danni, you’ll often have a gendered full name, Daniel or Daniela, and often the man version and the woman one are spelled differently.)
Growing up with a name that absolutely was NOT gender-neutral, I hated it. Because, obviously, it wasn’t my “good name”. And it thrust me, over and over, into a box that wouldn’t fit.
Apparently I hated the name since I was three or four. According to my parents, I came up with bizarre new names for myself, like “Grass”. During the wrong puberty, when I was tortured by the onrush of a hormone that poisoned and nearly destroyed me, I became wildly superstitious and convinced that [the male name they called me] was the source of all the world’s evil.
With that history of a “bad” name, I’m amazed when I meet transsexuals who HAVEN’T felt this need to run from the birth identity in which the world saw them. An example – I think – is my trans friend Jessica, who goes by “Jess”. Now I don’t know this, but I imagine that “Jess” was also a male name. I’m amazed that she’s okay with being referred to by something that’s not strictly female. It’s, at best, somewhat ambiguous.
Changing the name, I’ve always felt, is a major step in the life of someone like me, born in a hellishly wrong identity. It’s a step toward discarding that torturous birth identity and becoming the person that we truly are. Maybe the reason that others are okay with keeping their names is that they weren’t as tortured – and almost killed – by their birth (mis)identities as I was.
For me, I NEEDED that change.
And I went to ridiculous lengths to get it. It involved my father flying some legal papers out with him to the Philippines, for me to sign when he met me there. I signed them for the last time ever with that hated male name, and he flew back with them to California and submitted them to the court. After which I came to California and got a new driver’s license, social security card, passport, and all my diplomas, all using my “good name”. All in a matter of weeks. The longest wait was for my birth certificate – because they insisted I had to use “snail mail”. But I got that male identity’s records changed. It now states that I was born “Jane”, as a female. (Yes, I got a birth certificate, passport, and driver’s license that all lied about my sex. But I didn’t care – because I was able to take it all to India, where I got my body medically altered to be the sex that all of my paperwork said I was :D)
It still somewhat baffles me why a transsexual person WOULDN’T want this.
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