Things about my name
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June 30, 2024
I think I've been a Willow for about eight years now, and near
exclusively so for roughly six. I thought about just going to the
courthouse and make it official, since it's a very easy and
straight-forward process where I live.
But I decided against it for a rather practical and a thoroughly
modern reason: In today's over-connected and over-shared world it
is an advantage not to broadcast one's legal name everywhere. The
sad state of affairs now is that identity thieves, scammers, and
doxxers are plentiful. It's better if strangers online don't know
your name if that can be tied to your financial and legal data with
ease.
The other thing is, Willow is such a quintessentially nonbinary
name - plant names rarely go wrong, if you're writing a novel or a
play with nonbinary characters - although that was not on my mind
at all back then (rather, I was in my pagan phase - and someone
started calling me Willow and it got stuck, maybe because I looked
like a willow.).
Every once in a while I think about whether I should just go by one
of my middle names that is kind of androgynous (or, at least
versions thereof can be), but that would not necessarily address
the aforementioned issues (it is still quite easy to infer one's
identity from a middle name).
