I remember sci-fi/hacker media from the late 80s - early 2000s, full of people with names like Hagbard and Cereal and Hiro Protagonist. My response was always “aw man, so in the future we not only get to choose our names, but we can make our own cool unique ones that are related to the activities and identities we actually care about? This is awesome! I wish I had friends who had cool names based on their self identities. I wanna hang out with people named Y.T. and Whistler, but I’m stuck here in the suburbs with my friends Bob and Doug. So lame.”
Flash forward twenty five years, I’ve transitioned to male and I’ve started writing under the pen name Idal Waves. I’m talking to a family member about my friends and contemporaries and as I discuss people with names like Shoe and Fork and Evac, I realize that modern-day queer names and modern-day online handles are just the same as those dream hacker names of the early days of cyberpunk fantasy. They’re the identifiers that are chosen so you can do something cool, something so cool that you get a whole new name that you choose to describe yourself. A name for the world we choose to inhabit, not the one we’re stuck with.
Congratulations, pre-teen me. We made it. We’re cool as fuck and we got to choose our names and define ourselves and hang around with other people who do the same. The cyberpunk adults were right. It’s fucking awesome, just like you thought it would be.