agonyaunt | (no subject)

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Dear Prudence,

I have five children, ranging in ages from 12 to 20 years old, whom I absolutely adore. My youngest child has recently come out to us, stating they want to start a (very slow) transition to being a woman. We all support them fully on this. My problem is all my children were given names with a fairly specific pattern (I’m that kind of person), and the name my child has chosen, for now, does not match. I have been trying to encourage them to pick a name that matches their siblings’ names a little better. It would break my heart, and drive me crazy, to introduce my children as “Jill,” “Phil,” “Bill,” “Lill,” and … “Alexandria.” The name they have picked isn’t carved in stone, and I feel cruel and petty for not liking it. Am I in the wrong for trying to get them to change their name to one that fits their brothers and sisters a little better? They are already going through so much both mentally and physically. I want them to still feel a part of our family and not struggle any more than they have to.

—Can’t Name My Baby

I think you already know the answer to this question. You’re aware, on some level, that you’re trying to wrest back a degree of control that’s simply no longer your place to wield. I don’t doubt for a moment that you adore your children or that your decision to give them all matching names was a decision you made out of joy and excitement and a particular vision of family unity. Nor do I think you should berate yourself for feeling grief and loss about this change in the family lineup. But please save language like “It would break my heart and drive me crazy to introduce someone to my five children, whose names all rhyme but one” for a therapist, and don’t introduce that sort of intensity to your conversations with Alexandria. You’re entitled to whatever feelings come up for you during your daughter’s transition, but some of these feelings are best processed first in private, with a licensed professional, before sharing them with others.

Your children are growing up. You will never have the same sort of control (benevolent as it may have been) over them that you did when they were babies and you got to choose their names, their outfits, their sleep schedules, their diets, and their day-to-day activities. I can imagine a number of reasons why one or more of your kids might not want to have rhyming names with the rest of their siblings, while still loving all of you fiercely and being happy to be a part of your family. Your daughter is choosing her own name and making decisions about her life that you don’t get to make for her—that’s the point of growing up. It’s a feature, not a bug, as they say. You can attempt to leverage her with maternal pressure into choosing a name that pleases you, but the most it can possibly get you is external compliance and internal frustration. The worst it can get you is a daughter who feels confined, misunderstood, infantilized, and controlled, and who subsequently wants to pull away just when you’re longing to be close. Your vision of having five rhymingly named children is no longer possible. But your vision of five children who feel welcomed, loved, and free to pursue the things that make them different from one another without fear of judgment or reprisal is still very much open to you.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/dear-prudence-nurse-friend-coronavirus-hookup.html

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1. Your ability to control what your children are called ends when they enter kindergarten.

2. Yup, you sure sound like "that kind of person" all right. This isn't a neutral or complimentary observation. Did their other parent get a say in these matchy-matchy names?

Matching names? I rolled my eyes so hard I think I saw my brain.

I do think a therapist could be helpful here, if just to prise loose the controlling grip.

Also, LW would be utterly amazed at how common it is for families to have named their kids Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Aiden or Arabella, Ariana, Ariadne, and Madison. Phil, Jill, Bill, Lil, and Alexandria is much more typical than they think.

I know someone who had a daughter whose name started with A, and then a daughter whose name started with B, and then very pointedly a daughter whose name started with Z.

...as an ancient punchline floats to the top of my brain: "No, Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Jack, 'cause there ain't gonna be no Moe."

ahahahaha

I wonder if all the others go by the cute matchy-matchy names or whether to their friends and school/workmates they're known by self-chosen nicknames. (Smart money says yes.)

If their friends etc. don't know their siblings, then they might not care.

My parents named me and my siblings with Biblical names of 4 letters. They didn't make them fucking rhyme.

I have a friend whose mother named her and her sisters all six-letter names starting with L and 5-letter names starting with L (Lxxxxx Lxxxx Surname). The cutesy naming scheme thing is real.

I mean. No one has to keep their baby name. A trans person is less likely to keep their baby name, of course, but even cisgender folks will change their names for a wide variety of reasons.

If the kiddo doesn't feel like part of the family any longer because her name changed, was she really part of the family or was she just part of a set of paper dolls? Will she be pushed away because her name doesn't match or will she be allowed to grow into herself with the support of her family? The kiddo is 12, according to the letter, so that's a lot of growing to do. I hope LW chooses the kid she's got.

I’m the parent of a trans child who changed their name a little less than a year ago, and to a large degree I feel what this LW is going through. It was intensely and unexpectedly painful for my child to change their name, despite my longtime and serious belief that names belong not to the bestower but to the bestowee, and despite more than 20 years experience with trans friends changing their names, AND despite being nonbinary myself. I found myself doing things like “involuntary wordless screaming any time I am alone”. Like I’d just be sitting there doing my work on my porch and there’d be this...noise...and then I would realize it was me, keening about the name change.

The level of emotional pain at the name change was absolutely unprecedented. The only pain that came anywhere close was when a close friend committed suicide, I’m not joking. If I’d ALSO had a name-scheme for my kids that mattered to me, it probably would have been worse.

I think the advice is mostly good, but I think it’s very hard to understand that particular experience, and I’m pretty sure that (as someone on the other side of it), Danny doesn’t. I wish there’d been a suggestion to talk to other parents of trans kids about the experience of working through a name change, emotionally. I am not sure a therapist is actually the best choice here.

Yeah, I...I mean, I did change my name, albeit for reasons that really just come down to "I like this name better." My mother has been pretty chill about it (she's pretty chill about most things), but some of that probably comes down to me not expecting her or anyone in my family to even stop calling me by the nickname I've hated my whole life, much less by the first name she gave me.

So I know I'm a hypocrite when I say: it would break my heart if the small fanperson changed her name. I would get over it, but I'm not going to pretend that it wouldn't make me sad. I would honor her decision, of course, but yes, there would be a strong emotional reaction.

All the sympathy. This is also where I am, except that our trans child came out to us in January. I'm still at the 'here are all the things wrong with that name' point in my head, although I haven't had trouble using it after the first couple of days, which I'm thankful for.

And I agree that other parents of trans kids is a better choice than a therapist, because there just aren't enough therapists who have a clue on this kind of topic.

Yes, exactly! I didn't have trouble using it at all, but I had so much emotional trouble accepting that the old name was gone. I still sometimes cry about it (usually when I run across something with their old name on it).

:( I'm struggling a bit, because ours is still using the old name in some places, doing a very staged coming out. Which means I've resorted to not using their name a lot.

aw, that's rough

Thanks for sharing this story. I changed my name as a teenager. (At the time, neither my mom nor I knew I was nonbinary, so this had nothing to do with my gender on a conscious level.) My mom was so heartbroken. I never understood why she took it so hard. I still don't, but now I know she wasn't the only one, and I guess that opens my heart to her a little more.

Edited 2020-05-16 20:14 (UTC)

It was a very strange and unexpected reaction on my part -- the part that was most confusing to me was the emotional conflict with my extremely strong belief (which I've had my whole life and which hasn't changed as a result of this experience!) that names belong to the person who has to use the name. The way my feelings ping-ponged between those two emotional paddles was really weird to me.

I hope most sincerely that my kid wasn't aware of it -- I tried VERY hard to keep it from them -- but jeepers, it was hard.

I hate when my emotions disagree with my beliefs to that degree. (My experience of it is mostly polyamory-related, and it all worked out in the end, but there was a period with a lot of ow.)

I have a friend, I'll call them X, who has come out as NB and changed their name -- for the second time (first name change was from Deadname Middle Last to Middle NewMid Last, second was to NewMid NewNewMid Last; Deadname and Middle are both highly female-coded, NewMid and NNM are gender-neutral) and their mom is having the hardest time, both with the pronoun thing and with the name thing. X is super stressed and is doing the "if you can't respect me I'm cutting you out of my life" hard boundary.

I feel kind of bad for the mom, tbh. The social group X and I have in common is saying things like "good for you for setting boundaries, hopefully you mom will come to her senses before she loses you" and I'm just kind of flailing internally because on the one hand X has a right to assert their boundaries around being accepted as who they are, but on the other hand I'd bet the mom already feels like she's lost them. Partly because she's very deeply ingrained with the gender binary system and so NB is a brain-breaking concept, but more because X is "rejecting" everything that their parents gave. There was already friction on religious grounds (Christiannormalized vs Wicca) and now X is "discarding" both the name and the identity that their parents are used to.

I kind of feel like a bad friend and bad LGBTQ+ person for even thinking these things, let alone typing them out. I'm somewhat NB (but haven't told my parents) and completely believe in everyones' right to declare gender identity and I know X is doing what's right for their mental health, but I also have been doing a weird amount of internalized screaming because it doesn't feel like X is giving their mom enough space to grieve? I don't even know.

Why are emotions, anyway.

I think it's probably very hard on both sides with this one, speaking as a bi+ & nb person who has had some conflicts with parents about sexuality, and then being in the position of a parent of a trans kid and feeling some of what my parents probably felt _even though_ sometimes those emotions conflicted with my personal beliefs and ideals.

What I've found out is that yes, parents do need time to grieve; that no, probably parents aren't exaggerating when they say they feel like their child has died somehow*; none of that means that they can never come around; ALSO none of it means that they can dump those feelings on their kid! Process it elsewhere!

* I would literally find myself looking for [child's original name]. Like, they would be RIGHT THERE, I could see them and hug them and talk to them, but I would ALSO wander the house wondering where [original name] was, searching for them like they were lost. I would also wake up sobbing from dreams of being at their funeral. Before this, I thought parents who said that having a trans kid was like having a kid who died were being VERY weird and transphobic. But now I wonder how much of it is the brain literally having to rewire itself in certain ways.

I have an older trans friend whose mother developed dementia in the last few months of life. Turns out that the mother split friend into two people, treating them as both son and daughter. Which friend appeared to take really well. I also feel like I've two kids in one, and I'm not sure that my kid would take it as well.

I think dementia...might make it easier to accept for the child, because you know your parent is not doing something To You To Make A Nasty Point, but rather that their brain isn't working right. But I'm not sure (personally I struggled a lot with my great-grandmother's dementia).

I think in this case it really helped that it was short-lived, as part of a rapid downward slide, so friend didn't have to deal with it for a long period of time. Also, friend is amazingly laid-back about a number of things!

I picked up a nickname in college that fit me so much better than my given name that ranked in the top five most popular for my birth year (and probably century) and I still mostly go by it. And yeah, even though I told my mom I would happily answer to whatever (and mean it, especially from her), she was confused and pretty emotionally torn up by it. Still is, to some degree, thirty years on. And I want to think that if the Fanlet picked up a name for herself I'd be ok with it, but I honestly don't know.

So it's stories like this that make me think that maybe we'd be better off with a cultural expectation that kids get to choose their own names by some age. Or, whenever they want, really.

I hear you. Like if we were a culture where you had a childhood name and then a self-selected adult name, maybe it wouldn't be so rough if a kid changes theirs "early".

Tangential, but: I think the letter writer's "supportiveness" is belied by the fact that they keep using "they" about someone who has expressed that they are a woman.

("They" is a great pronoun for those whom it fits! Or for someone whose pronouns aren't known to you! But, as a trans man, I have had people "they" me because they don't want to use my correct he/him/his pronouns, and it sucks. It's transphobic in a way that's hard to call out, because hey, using "they" proves you're not really transphobic, right? I'd bet that the letter writer is trying not to call their daughter she/her.)

That really grated on me too.

Just saw that I managed to use the wrong f***ing pronouns for the LW's daughter, and it doesn't seem to be possible to edit my comment now. The above should read, "someone who has expressed that she is a woman." *facepalm*

Yeah, the pronouns were very noticeable in this letter.

Yeah, that's the first thing that made me twitch.

I'm very unsympathetic to the LW valuing their arbitrary child naming convention so much that they worry more about losing that than their children who as the answer so rightfully points out deserve to be "welcomed, loved, and free to pursue the things that make them different from one another without fear of judgment or reprisal".

Oh man. Names are hard and complicated. I kept my first name when I realized I was nonbinary, even though it's a very feminine name, because it's laden with family history and it was very important for me to affirm that, not distance myself from it. But I changed my last name, totally unrelated to being trans, because I wanted to feel closer to my mother's side of the family than my father's and because I liked the sound of it better. I also took my husband's last name as my middle name. It was a very personal and serious decision. My father made one (1) comment about being a little sad about me no longer having his last name and then dropped it (one of the few times he's acted like a reasonable human about such things).

My child's name has multiple layers of meaning and nuance, and one of them is that we very deliberately chose a gender-neutral name so that they wouldn't necessarily feel they had to change it to fit whatever identity they ended up having (which we're super glad of now that they're showing all signs of being agender). But they may grow up and decide they want a different name for any number of reasons—maybe they'll develop a strong gender identity and want an unambiguously feminine or masculine name, maybe they'll decide they hate the short syllable of their current name and want something long and flowing, maybe they'll take a name with religious or cultural significance. If that happens, I think I will make one (1) comment along the lines of "Would you consider keeping the initial K or hard C sound to honor my grandmother, who I named you for" and then drop it. Their name is no more my business than their gender is.

hm....... while it's certainly possible the child goes by 'they'....... this also feels like the kind of aggressive gender neutering to which trans women are often subject.

Also I bet all the kids fucking hate that patterned naming pattern; like twee to the max! (If you wanna give your kids patterned names that's cool but it just seems utterly unrealistic to demand that the children find it charming)

Name changes can be emotional in unexpected directions.

When my brother started transitioning and was ready to change his name, my first reaction was, "Oh cool, what do I call you now?" because obviously it's his choice and I support him. But when I realized he hadn't chosen a new middle name to go with his new first name, I had a massive internal "NO BAD WRONG" reaction because our names would no longer have the same number of total syllables and therefore his couldn't be sung to the rhythm of a little tune our dad made up a long time ago as a personalized family lullaby. It was the weirdest damn thing to feel happening in my own head and chest, especially because I was also metaphorically standing to one side watching myself have this reaction and thinking, "What the actual fuck is going on here? This is not my business!"

I ended up telling him about this, sort of as a "brains are strange and here's a strange thing mine is currently doing" point of academic interest, and then asked if he'd consider adding a new middle name of his choice. Turned out he hadn't even thought about it, and he ended up asking our mom for help picking a middle name -- which I think helped reassure her that he still very much wants to be her kid, just her son instead of her daughter. So now he has a first name and nickname of his choice, and a middle name that is entirely irrelevant except if I sing that family lullaby to annoy him, which is what we both have always done at each other since we were very small.

That is one of the sweetest stories I've heard in a long time. :)

I like this story. :D

This is darling. :)

<3 <3 <3

+1000

That's a wonderful story, thank you for sharing it.

...Roula, Doula, Soula, Voula, Agape, and the Lil' Gennelman.

Okay, so that's a joke that only a 40-50something Aussie is gonna get, but...

Um. I feel like matching names is awfully twee (says she whose grandfather changed her sisters' middle names by deed poll when they were babies, so that their middle names were matchy-matchy with my middle name) but you do you, LW. Except where your child is an adult and gets to pick what they're going to be called by, even if it doesn't match what you'd like them to be.

And...shot out of the dark here, but if they've chosen a name outside your strictures, it's more than likely they didn't like your stricture in the first place.

Is this the ocean-themed tree parent from the future?

There's nothing wrong with a pattern breaker. Just look at Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde

On the other hand, my mom was incredibly pleased when I changed my name. My mom had no real reason for naming me my birth name and she said she was happy to see me literally and figuratively come into my own.

The FUCK?!?

Here's a story: I had a horrible middle/high school experience and when I entered college, I chose a nickname that represented the "new me" I was hoping to be in the better atmosphere of life after high school. I never asked her to, but my mom uses that nickname about 99% of the time because she knows that what I want to be called.

Call people by the names they want! It's not fucking hard!

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