I have yet to find a name, but I’m considering feminine or androgynous variants of my birth name that sound vaguely Japanese. I ran them by my ex and he had no thoughts, so I guess I only selected options that sound normal for a millennial.

Went for something that meant a lot to me that sounded beautiful.

Pretty much it, really.

i went through a ton of baby name sites specifically looking for names popular in a certain time frame (since it gave me a little more euphoria like “that’s who i’ve always been”)

in the end, i went with katherine, because i loved katie but i wanted a fuller version, and elizabeth for my middle name because my mum originally had the name bethany if i was afab and i wanted to use it in my name since she was the first person i told :)

I wanted a powerful name to strike fear in the hearts of the people that wronged me.

I looked up names with meanings that spoke to me, then when I had a few I asked my bestie to help me narrow them down. She also made a gender neutral nickname out of my first name, which is what I usually go by. I love that I get to use a name she picked!

You might like my middle name, it means “island goddess”, but most English speaking people have no idea how to pronounce it lol

I actually knew what my name was going to be more than a decade before I transitioned. The first time I had ever heard it I sort of latched onto it, somehow I never met anyone else with the name (it’s not a particularly uncommon name) but it always stuck with me.

So when I started thinking about socially transitioning it was sort of a no-brainer, it felt like my “real” name had been there waiting for me all along. I know that must sound trite and cliche and not at all helpful but it was a really affirming moment in the process for me.

When I was a teenager, I tried on a name that I picked because it made me happy, but I didn’t mean to stick with that name. Decades later, that’s now my legal name, in honor of the person I was then and her idealism.

My chosen name, Tess, was literally picked from a variable name from de-obfuscated Minecraft code over a decade ago. It said Tesselator tess = ... or something like that. And I thought “that sounds neat”. Some time after, I found out it’s also a real name used by real people in the real world.

Name was honestly not that difficult in the grand scheme of things. Like yeah it took months and I was on hrt before I decided on a name but I already had an idea.

I just took my old initials and found names that came from a similar part of the world. From there I slimmed the list down based on their meanings/translations. I do think that if I had done anything different I’d have a different middle name just because the meaning is kinda an insult even if it’s not directed at me. I think that takes power away from the process.

Tried a few out before landing on my name. I went by another name for a couple months that just never really felt right. Then I found my name and every single person in my life was like “it’s perfectly you”. People still say that after they’ve known me for a while haha. I’m pretty sure I found the actual name just by scrolling through a name list. It jumped out at me right away and I was really really happy when I told my friends and they first started using the name for me.

I use a modified version of the feminine form of my given name. I spent a long time thinking about it but in the end it felt right.

I actually always knew my name, so that came naturally. But my middle name took a lot more consideration and I ended up settling on one shared by two video game protagonists that inspire me lol.

I just… tried a bunch. Alexandra was my first, used it for about 6 months online. Didn’t like it. Too harsh. Then I tried Sarah, felt better, new test group… but wasn’t right. Unsure why, just wasn’t me. Tried Amanda, and that was it.

The downside of this is you have to make disposable friend groups. I made mine on old internet kink websites, a few focused on like… pre-written “teases”. It kept things fairly transactional and anonymous so there wasn’t any relationships to break, just another content creator disappearing

not me but a high school friend transitioned lately. we all kinda knew this from high school though she hadn’t come out them. friends there used to call her with a feminine name which she liked. she took that name :)

I am no-contact with family and hated my given name, so I didn’t have the option of most of the suggestions here.

I went through a list of names common in my age group and birth area and stripped out the ones I didn’t want for initials. Then I bounced them off my spouse until we got a short list. I asked those who knew I was out to use them, and put them in as my preferred name for appointments.

It turns out all that work was pointless. We had a random night where we were doing something completely unrelated and my spouse said something that I misheard as my new name and it just stuck! Now my legal paperwork is done and I am just waiting for the courts to finish their side of it.