Hello, I'm Julie Knispel.
Except I’m not.
Except I am.
I sound very confused, I am sure, and I am further sure that you out there reading have no blinking idea what exactly I am on about. I'm hoping as we meander through the minefield of what passes for my mind that things will become clearer.
Lest we muddy the waters even further, let's begin.
ONCE upon a time, the blessed bard himself had this to say:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
In many ways this is true. Even if we did not know the name of the flower, we would still recognise its beauty, its fragility, its sweet scent. The flower is the flower is the flower. How and ever, if we know that it is called a rose, we can know that there is more variety within that tiny corner of the flowerbed than even the name defines. Do all roses smell the same? Does the rose smell differently to you than it does to me? Rose may be the identifier, but it only tells part of the story.
Sorry, Will.
So we can drill down from there. Scientifically, we can know that roses are part of the order Rosales, family Rosaceae, subfamily Rosoideae, genus Rosa. But did you know that there are at least 123 species of roses within the genus Rosa? They are all roses, yet they are also all unique. Each of them has its own name, and each of them is every bit as beautiful as the other, each of them is a rose, and each of them is unique. Do we consider the Rosa gallica as something better or prettier or more useful than the Rosa carolina? Likely not. And more likely, you didn't even know there were either of these two things, so how could you?
However...as people, we know that there are women. And there are women of many colours and ethnicities. And women of varying orientations. And, yes, women with vaginas, and women with penises. And we do judge them differently.
So let's go back to names.
My name is Julie. Specifically, my name is Juliette Alexandria Knispel. I'm Homo sapiens sapiens. There are many things I use as descriptors for me. I am an opera fan, I am a bass player, I am a comic book fan, I am a science fiction and fantasy aficionado, I am a gamer, I am a woman, and I am transgender. I'm Homo sapiens sapiens. If my genus, species and subspecies shows where I fall on the biological tree, each of the other things specialises me further down, and makes it easier perhaps to understand who I am. There may be many many people out there that have the same interests as I do, but there's only one (I hope) who has that set of interests and is named Julie Knispel. In using my name, you are recognising not just what I am, but who I am. You are recognising and seeing each of the qualities that make me who I am, including my gender and identity. You are recognising me.
Yet at the same time I'm NOT Juliette Alexandria Knispel. Legally I am not. Legally, I am recognised under a different name, with a different gender marker, with a name that carries a long history in my family yet is not mine at all, even if the name I go by is a variant of my given assigned name. I was assigned a gender and a name at birth, and those things mark me in a certain way so far as the world that I exist in is concerned.
Here's a story...when I was younger, among the plethora of other things I used to crayon the heck out of (like landscapes and fish and maps of the night sky and animals and so on), I went through a very intense period of drawing dresses and shoes. I didn't question it, it just seemed natural. It still does. In some ways I know this was subconscious expression, but that part is less important than the rest of it. The rest of it was this: I told myself that if I ever had a chance to name myself, I'd name myself Julie. It felt right. It felt good. It felt proper. Of course, I wasn't at all sure why it did, but it did.
Many many years later, as my interests in music broadened and enveloped multiple forms of expression, I came across a quote from the single greatest electric guitarist/composer/band leader/philosopher of all time, Mr. Robert Fripp:
“If I name myself, I recognize who I am. By recognizing who I am, I am becoming myself.”
Can we guess how easy it was to knock me over with a feather after that?
But it is so very true.
For so many people, names are a non-issue. They match our assigned identity and we get on with life merrily and with no consideration for what they mean. For me, a name that doesn't match my inner image is a point of conflict, like bones rubbing together with no connective tissue or cartilage. Like garnet paper scraping across exposed skin. Like lemon juice in an open wound. And many other things besides. In short, it hurts like hell.
Between birth and *muttersyearsago* I went through multiple iterations of my name, both first and middle, in an attempt to try and find something that fit, that at least felt semi-comfortable. Only one, the neutrois Jules, ever felt like it was something remotely close to acceptable and even there it was like wearing a shoe that was a half size too small or too large. It just wasn't right. I chafed against it. The more I chafed, the more I wanted to change it, the more it hurt.
I finally sucked it up two years ago and changed my name on here to Julie. Emotionally the change was night and day. The same could be said for a couple of the web forums I used to frequent, where I started new accounts under Julie rather than the other name...the comfort level was just...it was a wonderful thing, honestly. I felt like myself.
Here's a thing about 'old' names: they have a way of lingering. We call them deadnames, and while we're not dead, the name is. Deadnames are the names we were assigned, the names that we used for expansive swaths (not swatches) of our lives. They're names that we don't identify with for any of a variety of reasons. Hell, even non-trans people can have deadnames...if someone changes their name because of negative associations with their family or whatever, guess what? Their old name is a deadname too. For almost al cases, however, deadnames and deadnaming is a very much trans spectrum thing.
Deadnaming someone is a horrible thing. Deadnaming can happen for a number of reasons.
From Gender Wiki:
1: Someone accidentally deadnames because they're used to using that name.
For example: John Doe called his transgender sister, "Steve" by accident because he had referred to her as that for most of his life. He apologized and corrected himself.
2: Someone purposefully deadnames to cause distress.
For example: At school, while Jen was walking down the hall, Anthony walked by her and coughed "Steve." Jen got upset and tried to correct Anthony, but he just walked away snickering.
3: Someone purposefully deadnames because of their beliefs.
For example: Great Aunt Mary called Jen "Steve" because she believed that Jen is still a boy.
One could sit there and try to rationalise an order of hurt, i.e., 3 hurts more than 2, 2 hurts more than 1, 1 hurts the least of all. However, having said that...it's a load of cobbler's. Hurt is hurt is hurt, and honestly? Even if 1 is the least hurtful of all, on the famous 10 scale that number 1 option can often be an 8 or 9 anyway, even if the accidental deadnaming is well and truly an accident.
When we choose our names, we do so with a great deal of thought in many cases. For one example, I have a good friend on here whom I knew initially under one name, who then came to me and said that she wasn't sure if she wanted to stay with that name, and was thinking back and forth between the name she was using and another name. It's hard to offer advice on a name because it is so intensely personal, but I listened as best I could. She made her decision, and honestly, I think the name she chose fits so well that it's impossible to think of her as the name she was using before (even if it simply moved to her middle name).
For me, I put way more thought into how I'd spell my first name (Julie vs. Juliet vs. Juliette) and what I'd use as a middle name than what my first name would be. If you saw one of the comment threads on here a while back, my friend Sara and I had a little back and forth on the merits of Alexandria vs. Aria, and my response that as much as I love Aria (cos hey, music!) Alexandria means I have a 3-5-3 symmetry in my name and that structural balance suits my sense of math plus the way the names sound together suits my sense of poetry and music. Geekery, thy name is Julie. The long and short of it is that the name matters to me; it defines me for me, it defines me for the people around me (and amazingly, my chosen name has the same basic meaning as my assigned name, a fact that was completely not known to me when I decided on what I decided. Colour me shocked. I was shocked. Shocked, I say. Did I mention I was shocked? Because I was shocked.). It is a name that feels right, like a pair of broken in jeans that are worn and super soft in all the right places.
It's a name that's me, in every way.
I caused a fuss on here, and lost (no, lost isn't the right word...I kicked to the curb) someone who took umbrage over, a statement I made that misgendering and deadnaming is an act of violence, to the effect that such things smack of Tumblr social justice warrioring and cast the entire trans community in a bad light. Let me shed some light on things:
1) Your name is Michael.
2) You like the name, you identify with the name, it defines you.
3) I start calling you Erica.
4) You ask me to stop.
5) I keep calling you Erica.
6) I insist you're a woman, even tho you are a man and totally 137.65% ok with being a man.
7) You beg me to stop.
8) I continue to insist you are a woman named Erica.
What would you do? Would you take it? Would you lash out? Would you feel dehumanised, misunderstood? Would you feel like someone is denying not only your identity, but your essential humanity? My guess is that you very much would. My guess is that it would hurt a whole lot. My guess is that you'd look at what I was doing as abuse. And do you know why you'd look at it as abuse?
BECAUSE IT BLOODY WELL IS.
Within the trans community, however...we deal with this every day. A microaggression is still an aggression. Accidental deadnaming hurts just as much as intentional deadnaming. Accidential misgendering hurts every bit as much, and sucks every bit as much, as intentional. My hypothetical to you is my reality every day of the week.
If you know a person's deadname, don't ever use it.
If you see someone using a person's deadname, call them out on it.
If you accidentally misgender someone, apologise. Don't make it about you, don't center yourself. Apologise, own it, grow from it. It hurts, yeah, but we'd (I'd) rather an act of honest contrition than someone falling all over themselves wailing and gnashing their teeth over the offense.
When we tell you our names, our pronouns, our identity, respect them. We respect the damn out of your names, because we know the power that names have. Respect is given to people who give respect. We know it can be hard, we understand that, and I think I can say that we know that we're going to get hurt from time to time out of an honest mistake...because we're human. I say inadvertently hurtful things...I may or may not even realise that they are hurtful, but they are. I own the mistake, I learn from the mistake, and I try very hard not to repeat the mistake. It's only when the same mistake is repeated over and over, with the same 'Oh it was a mistake I'm sorry' that we start to realise it's really not a mistake.
Does a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?
Perhaps it does.
But how much cooler is it to know the sweet rose you're smelling is the Rosa laevigata (Cherokee Rose), and know the history and meaning behind it?
As always, thanks for reading along. Tune in next time when...
* whispers *
...when we just might talk about sex.
(NB: as always, this is posted under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license with the intent that you may share it if you have found it informative, helpful, or enlightening. You may use extracts, properly attributed, as part of your work as long is it is openly shared under similar license.)
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