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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
I asked a question elsewhere of someone about the spelling of their name, and I've been shown the Rainbow Sheep Ornament Project, which will send a person a holiday tree-decorating ornament with their name on it, intended so as to give someone who has changed their name along with the transition of their gender identity a thing that is theirs to decorate with that has their correct name on it, to start a new tradition and help move away from any previous ornamentation that has an old name associated with it, and that sort of offers a question that's been asked in a few different ways before.
Because names are important. The concept of the True Name, and the associated power that it has, is an important concept in a lot of fantasy genre literature. Speak something's True Name, or something in the language of the true speech, and you have power over that thing, whether to command or control it or to reshape its very nature into something else. In setting with True Names, there's almost always a use name or a given name or some other name that's not the name that holds power. Earthsea, among other works, made good use of the fact that Ged had a true name and that it was important for him not to let too many people know about it.
In several of the Abrahamic traditions, the Name of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton is extremely powerful and not to be used lightly, carelessly, or at all. Euphemisms are substituted so that the person reading aloud does not speak the Name itself. (One of those euphemisms, is, in fact, The Name.) xkcd is very fond of the use of True Names causing things (admittedly, usually disasters) to happen, such as Gretchen McCulloch summoning a bear by speculating about what its True Name might be, Cueball summoning the actual sheeple that have been slumbering for ten thousand years, and an experiment involving two mirrors placed directly opposite each other and summoning Bloody Mary. With what might be the predictable results, were it known that this was the kind of world where this was not only possible, but replicable.
On the plane of humans, there are more than a few traditions where one takes on a name or uses a different name in the space that is supposed to be set apart from such mundanities. The rite of Confirmation in Roman Catholicism involves the candidates taking on a name, after research of associated saints, to invoke their aid as intercessors before The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton and to hopefully also remember and take on the qualities that made their chosen saint beatified and canonized. The Bishop of Rome in that same tradition, upon ascension to the office, chooses a name for himself on much the same principles, possibly also as a sign to his flock as to what type of pontiff he intends to be. Several cultures of the world have a child with a child's name, one given to them, which they then discard upon reaching a certain age and assume to themselves their own name. (I forget where, but at least one thing I've read about such things suggests that the child's name is given to them through the time when they were most likely to perish, and a belief or tradition arose with it of giving the child a name so as to confuse or otherwise mislead or keep away the entities responsible for children dying until they were old enough to survive.)
Not all traditions of taking on a new name are necessarily ones with a religious aspect to them. Secret societies or other places that wish to hide or anonymize their conspirators might have them all take on different names so as not to give away the game if one of them is captured. Members of kink communities might take on different names or identities if it would be dangerous for them to be known as kinky in the communities where they are under the names that they present to that outside world.
And, as has been mentioned here and there, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Or, for that matter, whether your fursona is a dog. Zuckerberg's Folly and other such places that insist on a "real name" policy aside, the Internet is built upon pseduonymity, such that a person gets known by their handle where they go, for better or for worse. And, as we have found out, if it ends up being worse, it's still quite possible to jettison the old handle, find some new places to hang out in, and try again with a different presentation to the world. (Even if it's much harder now, because of places that want to track you all over everywhere and the ease in which data can be crunched to make it harder for someone to be able to fully disappear from a place and then return to it later. Because, smartly, a lot of places have said that changing names to get around being banned is a bannable offense and more stringent measures will be put in place to stop it from happening again.)
But, eventually, we come back to the core of the question, and those moments in time where someone says "this name that I have used, I renounce it, and in its stead, I choose this name." Most commonly, people think of that with regard to marriage and divorce, and there are still some very gendered expectations around who will be changing their name in the partnership, even if we've managed to progress to the point where people will at least ask first as to whether someone is changing their name or not when they get married. And there's an acceptance of hyphenation of name, at least, so that any children raised in the partnership will bear the name of both partners. I don't want to say "more recently, we have seen the changing of name occur with people who aren't engaging in sealing or breaking the marriage contract," because that suggests a certain primacy of marriage that I want to avoid, and it also erases the reality that there are plenty of people who have been petitioning to change their names or who have engaged in either work or recreation under a different name than the one they were given at birth. The acting profession, for example, and the likelihood that a person doing acting has at least one other name that they work under, either for union work or for non-union work, so that they can continue to receive and consider work without having to violate any rules. Writers have noms de plume, sometimes to obscure what gender they should be perceived as, sometimes to make sure that all the urban fantasy stays under one name and the science thrillers stay under another. There are lots of reasons that people add a name to themselves, and we generally accept this as normal and valid, often because we don't necessarily know them by any other name than the one they've presented to us.
So that's not quite renouncing the name that came before, but having a proper alias or an also-known-as or other parts that can eventually be knit together into a whole of "all these names are the same bodily entity." And those things sort of rely on the idea that all the names are wanted ones. But there are a lot of situations where the names are not wanted, no longer wanted, and to keep using them is causing injury and pain. Our world is set up on the idea that a person does not get to choose their name, but has to fight for it, instead. Some places make the fight much easier, by accepting the names that people use for themselves, by learning how to say and use the name and its associated pronouns, by providing clear and easy pathways for them to change their name on documents, and by affirming their choices that move in the direction of a person being able to express their full, complete, and authentic selves. Others insist that children cannot possibly know anything as important to themselves as who they are, insist upon mountains of paperwork and fees to change documents, claim that changing the names on the published work would be a corruption of the integrity of their processes, and otherwise try to put as many roadblocks in the way and loudly proclaim that a person who would make such a transition is confused, deluded, or otherwise wrong and will come to accept what everyone else is telling them is true, rather than what they know is the truth with the conviction of their own heart. Deadnames are used as violence, to reject the reality in front of someone and insist that their way of seeing the world is truer, that others should bend their own identities to fit that perception, rather than assert their own truth and reality. What an act of arrogance, of profound rudeness, to insist that you know better than someone else does about who they are.
What goes into a name? An entire being, their experiences, their triumphs and sorrows, the pain they've received and the thought they've given. Because a chosen name is almost always done with thought and wanting to take on the aspects or the meanings of the name chosen. Someone's name, especially their chosen name, is telling you the kind of person they want to be. That's got to be important.
I asked a question elsewhere of someone about the spelling of their name, and I've been shown the Rainbow Sheep Ornament Project, which will send a person a holiday tree-decorating ornament with their name on it, intended so as to give someone who has changed their name along with the transition of their gender identity a thing that is theirs to decorate with that has their correct name on it, to start a new tradition and help move away from any previous ornamentation that has an old name associated with it, and that sort of offers a question that's been asked in a few different ways before.
What's in a name?
Because names are important. The concept of the True Name, and the associated power that it has, is an important concept in a lot of fantasy genre literature. Speak something's True Name, or something in the language of the true speech, and you have power over that thing, whether to command or control it or to reshape its very nature into something else. In setting with True Names, there's almost always a use name or a given name or some other name that's not the name that holds power. Earthsea, among other works, made good use of the fact that Ged had a true name and that it was important for him not to let too many people know about it.
In several of the Abrahamic traditions, the Name of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton is extremely powerful and not to be used lightly, carelessly, or at all. Euphemisms are substituted so that the person reading aloud does not speak the Name itself. (One of those euphemisms, is, in fact, The Name.) xkcd is very fond of the use of True Names causing things (admittedly, usually disasters) to happen, such as Gretchen McCulloch summoning a bear by speculating about what its True Name might be, Cueball summoning the actual sheeple that have been slumbering for ten thousand years, and an experiment involving two mirrors placed directly opposite each other and summoning Bloody Mary. With what might be the predictable results, were it known that this was the kind of world where this was not only possible, but replicable.
On the plane of humans, there are more than a few traditions where one takes on a name or uses a different name in the space that is supposed to be set apart from such mundanities. The rite of Confirmation in Roman Catholicism involves the candidates taking on a name, after research of associated saints, to invoke their aid as intercessors before The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton and to hopefully also remember and take on the qualities that made their chosen saint beatified and canonized. The Bishop of Rome in that same tradition, upon ascension to the office, chooses a name for himself on much the same principles, possibly also as a sign to his flock as to what type of pontiff he intends to be. Several cultures of the world have a child with a child's name, one given to them, which they then discard upon reaching a certain age and assume to themselves their own name. (I forget where, but at least one thing I've read about such things suggests that the child's name is given to them through the time when they were most likely to perish, and a belief or tradition arose with it of giving the child a name so as to confuse or otherwise mislead or keep away the entities responsible for children dying until they were old enough to survive.)
Not all traditions of taking on a new name are necessarily ones with a religious aspect to them. Secret societies or other places that wish to hide or anonymize their conspirators might have them all take on different names so as not to give away the game if one of them is captured. Members of kink communities might take on different names or identities if it would be dangerous for them to be known as kinky in the communities where they are under the names that they present to that outside world.
And, as has been mentioned here and there, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Or, for that matter, whether your fursona is a dog. Zuckerberg's Folly and other such places that insist on a "real name" policy aside, the Internet is built upon pseduonymity, such that a person gets known by their handle where they go, for better or for worse. And, as we have found out, if it ends up being worse, it's still quite possible to jettison the old handle, find some new places to hang out in, and try again with a different presentation to the world. (Even if it's much harder now, because of places that want to track you all over everywhere and the ease in which data can be crunched to make it harder for someone to be able to fully disappear from a place and then return to it later. Because, smartly, a lot of places have said that changing names to get around being banned is a bannable offense and more stringent measures will be put in place to stop it from happening again.)
But, eventually, we come back to the core of the question, and those moments in time where someone says "this name that I have used, I renounce it, and in its stead, I choose this name." Most commonly, people think of that with regard to marriage and divorce, and there are still some very gendered expectations around who will be changing their name in the partnership, even if we've managed to progress to the point where people will at least ask first as to whether someone is changing their name or not when they get married. And there's an acceptance of hyphenation of name, at least, so that any children raised in the partnership will bear the name of both partners. I don't want to say "more recently, we have seen the changing of name occur with people who aren't engaging in sealing or breaking the marriage contract," because that suggests a certain primacy of marriage that I want to avoid, and it also erases the reality that there are plenty of people who have been petitioning to change their names or who have engaged in either work or recreation under a different name than the one they were given at birth. The acting profession, for example, and the likelihood that a person doing acting has at least one other name that they work under, either for union work or for non-union work, so that they can continue to receive and consider work without having to violate any rules. Writers have noms de plume, sometimes to obscure what gender they should be perceived as, sometimes to make sure that all the urban fantasy stays under one name and the science thrillers stay under another. There are lots of reasons that people add a name to themselves, and we generally accept this as normal and valid, often because we don't necessarily know them by any other name than the one they've presented to us.
So that's not quite renouncing the name that came before, but having a proper alias or an also-known-as or other parts that can eventually be knit together into a whole of "all these names are the same bodily entity." And those things sort of rely on the idea that all the names are wanted ones. But there are a lot of situations where the names are not wanted, no longer wanted, and to keep using them is causing injury and pain. Our world is set up on the idea that a person does not get to choose their name, but has to fight for it, instead. Some places make the fight much easier, by accepting the names that people use for themselves, by learning how to say and use the name and its associated pronouns, by providing clear and easy pathways for them to change their name on documents, and by affirming their choices that move in the direction of a person being able to express their full, complete, and authentic selves. Others insist that children cannot possibly know anything as important to themselves as who they are, insist upon mountains of paperwork and fees to change documents, claim that changing the names on the published work would be a corruption of the integrity of their processes, and otherwise try to put as many roadblocks in the way and loudly proclaim that a person who would make such a transition is confused, deluded, or otherwise wrong and will come to accept what everyone else is telling them is true, rather than what they know is the truth with the conviction of their own heart. Deadnames are used as violence, to reject the reality in front of someone and insist that their way of seeing the world is truer, that others should bend their own identities to fit that perception, rather than assert their own truth and reality. What an act of arrogance, of profound rudeness, to insist that you know better than someone else does about who they are.
What goes into a name? An entire being, their experiences, their triumphs and sorrows, the pain they've received and the thought they've given. Because a chosen name is almost always done with thought and wanting to take on the aspects or the meanings of the name chosen. Someone's name, especially their chosen name, is telling you the kind of person they want to be. That's got to be important.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 09:23 am (UTC)This is such an interesting perspective on it! I love it.
Lots for me to think about here, thank you.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 03:48 pm (UTC)I work with many customers who are from non-European cultures, and almost all of them do not have name changes upon marriage. The children do take the father's name, but the wife rarely does that I can see.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 04:36 pm (UTC)It's good to know that the name changes in marriage are mostly European (and Europe colony) in nature. I wonder what things might have been like if that part of the culture wasn't present over time.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 06:24 pm (UTC)(for several disjoint reasons)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-14 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-14 07:55 am (UTC)I suspect I imprinted on that concept pretty hard.