we were surprised a few months ago to realise that people have connections with their given names. we had not realised that this was a thing (see: unnoticed autism). we have never experienced this feeling in meatspace, really; our human, who from now on we will call [deadname] since it is the name that for various reasons they are forced to use, has always despised their given name. they wonder sometimes if perhaps it is because they had no name between birth and about eight days into their life. before they were born, their name was annemarie, and then they were born with an inconvenient appendage and their parents decided they had been mistaken, and that put paid to that. so they were saddled with [deadname].
if a name feels like a signifier for yourself, for the term that shows you at home in your body, we can be said never to have had a name until 2010. then we found sian.
back in the original few years of secondlife, you picked from a regularly changing list of surnames and registered a given name in front of that; in late 2010, linden labs retired the old first name/surname schema and made everyone have a single username, and if you needed to use a surname, you just used “resident” (a resident being the jargon name for a second life persona). but you could also change your display name so that while your username was what you registered with and logged in with, once a week you could make the name that floats above your head something different.
the original sian account was not in fact called sian; it was called sion, and it had a surname. if you are not from wales, you may not know that sion and sian are the welsh for john and jane, and that you pronounce them shaun and shahn. when they made it so you could change display names, we more or less immediately switched to lowercase (because lowercase suited us) and the distaff (same) and suddenly we were who we were always supposed to be. we had a name, an actual designation that fit us.
still, we had a slightly different username, and occasionally there was confusion.
it was enough. or it was for a while, until things went wrong, and then we had our collapse.
we returned to secondlife in 2018, logging in with an alt account that we had started in 2011, made after surnames went away. the account was named after a relatively obscure character from a european comic, eurocomics being the one fandom that [deadname] freely admits to having.
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[this comic character, fwiw] |
but it was a bad idea from the start. it was always someone else’s name, you see. and we grew out of that character, that comic book.
from the moment we returned, we kept changing the name, trying on new ones, trying to find out what we were supposed to be called. we were 7susan for a while. then for longer, we were heidë because we thought that might be a name that would fit us in both worlds. but we tired of it. for longer still, we were simply the number 37542 – the number has been for reasons we cannot remember a constant in our fictions. 37542 was the self-insert protagonist in the shuddery, secret fictions [deadname] wrote as a teenager, where we were a bald, transgender cyborg programmed in different ways (realising that we have wanted to be like this for almost our entire life is quite a trip). we still use it. it is why it is now on sian’s forehead, because it is part of who we are.
and then, last year, we decided that we would reclaim the only name that actually mattered to us. and we started blogging again. but we were still stuck logging in with the name of a comic book character we did not care about. it was still on sian’s birth certificate, you understand.
in october, during our blog hiatus, we discovered that secondlife was bringing surnames back. you could change your username for a new one, and have a surname from the list, just like the old days. you just needed a premium account, and to pay a not-inconsequential but also not-unaffordable amount of cash.
so, curious, we looked at the surnames. alpha. alpha was right there, first on the list. and we immediately realised that we had to be sian alpha. it seemed like the sort of name a transeverything cyborg would have, the alpha version of a person. and so we paid for a month’s premium account and paid immediately for a name change, waited a week, and cancelled premium. and now we have a surname again, and more importantly, we are sian. sian on the account, sian by default, sian without pretending to be anyone else. not a pseudonym or a nick. our name, sian, forever. it is the happiest we have ever been with our account. we are sian. we are sian. it feels good just typing that.
and now this is where you meet anastasiia. ana is one of our best friends, whom we love with a brutal force. sian has known ana in secondlife for a good decade, and ana was one of the very few people who was not only friends with the old sian, but also with [deadname] after the old sian died. ana had a similar problem to sian with her username, and when sian told her she could get a surname too, ana went and fixed her name too, pretty much at the same time sian did. yesterday sian and ana met up inworld and sian said, shall we have some pictures together? and ana said she would love that. so we did, and ana subbed it right up, because ana is a good doll too.
now sian and ana have the names they were meant to have, and they can log in as themselves with their names. not given names, but taken names.
(featured clothing – sian r2 sekkou [at collabor88 right now, shopping fans]; ryusei boots / silvery k sparking fur coat [also collabor88] / krova cyber cod piece)
(featured clothing – ana avec toi minerva waist corset; minerva pencil skirt; crave gloves; discipline covers / puki my long point nails / moda sasha fur / doux hallucination hair / punch pentagram hoop earrings / cynful upper class necklace / s&p bondage deluxe collar / nx-nardcotix ida stilettos)
