We Asked Trans People To Share The Stories Of Their Names
“I took a name that was meant to shame me and used it to empower myself.”
Your name is often the first thing people learn about you, but most of us don't choose our own. This is not the case for many trans and gender-nonconforming people, who often choose new names that better reflect their inner selves.
Charlotte Gomez/BuzzFeed
"I started going by Loma three years ago. I was traveling the country and settled for a bit on a queer commune in the woods of Tennessee. That was the first place where I asked people to call me Loma, instead of my government name, Christopher Soto. As a child, friends used to call me Soto. During college, the predominately white community around me decided to start calling me Chris. I felt like 'Soto' (the name of my childhood) was dead and 'Chris' was a name that I never asked to be called — it wasn't mine.
I made up Loma instead in an attempt to reclaim myself and reclaim my gender and ethnicity. I like the a and a sounds in the word. It feels balanced in gender. Loma means 'hill' in Spanish. I grew up at the foothills of the San Bernandino Mountains in California. I feel like a hill just starting to grow into a mountain."
—Loma
"I originally chose my name in order to respect my father's choice to name all the men in the family after biblical figures, hoping it would make my transition easier for him. It didn't.
After I chose 'Mark' I found out that is means 'rebellious,' which, as one of my high school teachers pointed out to me, is 'kind of fitting for everything you've had to go through in order to be your true self.'"
—Mark