What’s in a name for this trans gal?

Why I changed my username from Girlieboy69 to Femina Viva.

This has been a long time coming.  I am not a “girlie boy” anymore.  That name was born back before hormones.  And plus, the ‘69’ is a bit trite, don’t you think?

I wanted ‘boytogirl’ but it was taken, but then somehow, this idea of a living woman took hold.  Femina viva. I would have spelled it Femmina as you would in Italian, but I am not sure that people would get that. This change parallels an imminent legal name change too.  My birth name will never be a ‘dead’ name as it is suitably androgynous.  But it is often shortened to a nickname I’ve always rejected, and which sounds male.  And now that I am legally female, I feel really good about taking a female name.

I have done this in consultation with my children, and we have all chosen my new name together.  I didn’t ditch any of my old names, just added two new ones, so now I have five.

The selection process has been long.  I got try them all out with different people, in different situations, and now I found one that I felt my ears liked to hear when I was called.

So far away from the day when I was little and I told my mother how I hated my name and that I wanted a new one.  She said, “okay, what’s your new name?”

“Ron,” I answered.  I’m not kidding.  Barf.

“Okay Ron,” she said, and the second I heard it, I knew I hated even more.

“Never mind,” I said and walked out of her home office.

My children are active in my real life renaming.  The list of names has gone from 100+ of viable names down to 3 or 4, with one clear front-runner.  I have to live in it for a while, hear people call me it.  But I am getting used to ‘she’ and I have to say, I really like it.

What else? I am finding out the meaning of true friendship, and who is really on my side…and who is just a fake. And while it is sad to let go of people that once were really important, the fact is that if they are chimeras, what we loved was always an illusion. Who wants to love something that wasn’t real?