What’s in a name? A lot, when you choose it yourself!
I decided I liked the name Dev a long time ago. My Hebrew name began with Dev, and Dev felt somewhat masculine, but also familiar. I didn’t think about my middle name at all until someone commented that they liked how I had combined my previous first and middle names, however. That was not intentional! […]
Changes: Name, pronouns, and more
I’ve been contemplating a name change for a while. For a long time, I argued that my name was a nonbinary name because I was nonbinary. And that’s still true—any name can belong to any person of any gender. But I could see when people made the connection. This person must be a woman, because […]
Long-Overdue Update
So I’ve been trying to figure out where to start, and I think the answer is an infodump followed up by posts, because SO much has happened. In the past few months: I changed my name at work and elsewhere, and I’m looking into a legal name change I started using he/him pronouns and identifying […]
Societal Expectations
Some people have very strong beliefs about gender presentation. To them, you must choose one of their two gender options to be acceptable. You must wear (and not wear) certain things to be acceptable to them, based on that gender. I actively fight that. I want to be seen as me, able to express myself […]
“Gendered” characteristics, size diversity, and more
I recently spoke with my aunt and shared the blog post from the other day where I responded to that quote she posted. I mentioned that I really like being asked questions, because not only can I help others understand me better, but they often help me understand myself better. She asked something that I’ve […]
I’m Just Me
I recently posted about my work with the word “fat” as a label. I was trying to decide if I could apply it to myself, and I realized something today in therapy that made a lot of sense to me. With gender, I’ve said for a long time that I’m not a man and I’m […]
Pronouns
Pronouns, as many of you know, are what enable us to avoid sentences like, “Alice left Alice’s gloves in Alice’s office, so Alice left to go get Alice’s gloves.” Instead, we can say, “Alice left her gloves in her office, so she left to go get them.” Many of us learned that people use either […]
Gender Memories
I remember lining up in two lines in elementary school—one for girls, and one for boys. Even then, I wondered why we did that. It wasn’t fair that I never got to line up with my friends, who were invariably boys. I also was upset that I couldn’t join the Boy Scouts with my friends. […]