The subject of names often comes up in Reddit's trans and non-binary community. Many non-binary people end up changing their names; some only change for daily usage, but others go as far as to legally change their names. Some have both a male name and a female name, but others choose one name and stick to it. I guess I fall a bit into both categories. I figured I should tell the story of my name change desires and how I ended up naming myself Sascha.
Changing my name is something I've wanted to do ever since I was very young, long before acknowledging and accepting my identity, all that thanks to an absolutely ridiculous French-Canadian naming custom that the Catholics forced into place. Said naming custom has fallen out of usage in my province (sadly, it did so AFTER I was born), but in Québec I believe this still happens. What it amounts to is, every child has to be baptised, and once this is done they get a religious name slapped onto their birth certificate - BEFORE THEIR FIRST NAME! All male children get the name Joseph, and female children get the name Marie. An example: If I was born male and my parents followed this custom, my name would be Joseph Sascha Lastname instead of just Sascha Lastname. You're stuck walking around with a religious indoctrination on your damn birth certificate before you even know what religion IS! I always hated how my parents had allowed my name to be desecrated like that. It just gave me another reason to hate my birth name - I already disliked my "real" birth name, though when I was young I didn't know why. I clearly remember yelling to my parents "DON'T CALL ME [BIRTH NAME]!" almost every time they called me by my birth name. They never got the message, though.
The desire to change my name has always existed thanks to this little incident, but the desire to have a more neutral name came along later. When I was 15 or so, I gained a nickname that was derived from my character's name in an MMORPG I extensively played at the time. Said character's name was a neutral one, so my nickname was also neutral. Nicknames by themselves don't do much, but this name "bled over" into offline life thanks to having local friends who played the same game and now called me by that nickname even in person, out of habit. And it felt FUCKING GREAT! I had a name that said NOTHING about my sex! I didn't realise at the time that that was why I liked it, but I already enjoyed not being called by my birth name. It was the first time I had a proper nickname that wasn't some sort of feminising bullshit. (I'll go into more detail on feminising bullshit in the French language in a different post.)
As I got older and closer to the key age at which I could change my name without having to go through my parents (not because they didn't want to - in fact, they've known about my desire to change my name for years and give no fucks about it - but because the name change procedure is much easier when you're legally an adult), I started toying around with names. Silly me thought I was restricted to female names at first, though. I started to play around with calling myself Lisbeth, like Lisbeth Salander from Millennium, but I gave up on it because I am very clearly not Swedish. Then I went for Cydonia, like the Muse song. It ends in the traditionally feminine -a, but it can still be neutral, right? Plenty of male names end that way!
I grew out of Cydonia, but I do still love the name - I'll find a way to use it eventually. Then I started to think about neutral or male names that end in -a, and two names popped into my mind first: Nicola (like Nicola Sirkis) and Sascha (like Sascha Konietzko). Nicola is usually a female name, I later learned, and Nicola Sirkis is apparently one of the only males to use the name. I gave it a shot, but it didn't really stick. I don't have the face of a Nicola, though I do have the right hair for it.
There was still Sascha, though. Sascha is usually a male spelling, particularly in German - in fact, the name is only on the male side of the approved names list in Germany. I dug around the net to find info on the name, though, and realised something interesting. In French, the spelling Sascha is never seen, but two different spellings do exist - Sacha and Sasha. Sacha is typically male in my language. Sasha, though rarer in French than in English, is typically female. Put them together, and what do get? Sascha! I gave it a shot, and it seemed to fit me great, so finally, I had a gender-neutral name that stuck. I was now Sascha! (This last paragraph is what I usually write on Reddit when the topic of names comes up. It's short and to the point. I just figured it'd be interesting to tell the whole story in a post here.)
Not a lot of people I know call me like that yet. A lot of the people around me aren't really familiar with non-binary identities, or worse, don't believe in them, so I don't know how I could explain it to them. My parents know about my identity, but I haven't yet told them I'd like to be called by another name. The rest of my family would probably flip their shit, though. My aunt and grandmother, in particular, are the type to pull the "BUT YOU'RE A GIRL!" card every time I do something vaguely masculine or "non-feminine" according to their stunted and narrow world view. Fuck you two, I'm not a girl.
That's why I like the internet. Here, I'm just Sascha. It doesn't matter who I am offline or what I look like or how I present myself. I can be 100% myself, with no worries of repercussions or anything like that.
In any case, I have name change papers in hand. In a couple months, I'll be legally Sascha. I AM SO EXCITED! I'm demoting my current first name to my middle name, mostly out of convenience for all my papers and stuff. My current middle name is going to be wiped from existence after twenty fucking years of staining all of my government papers. (A great big fuck you to my province's government for making me use a name I've never used in my entire life on every single province-issued paper I own.)
If anyone asks about my name, I'll tell them I had eccentric parents who named me after Käpt'n K. After all, they don't need to know the whole story.
