Something that happens to me with relative frequency is, when I introduce myself to someone for the first time, I have a dialogue nearly identical to this:
Me: Hi, I’m Holden, nice to meet you.
Them: Holden…that’s an interesting name!
Me: Yes it’s sort of uncommon.
Them: It’s beautiful.
Me: Thank you.
Now, the subtext of the conversation is actually this:
Me: Hi, I’m Holden, nice to meet you and pretty please pick up on my masculine name and don’t get my gender wrong.
Them: Holden is a very interesting name for a girl!
Me: Although I’m not a girl, yes it’s sort of uncommon.
Them: I’m going to describe it as beautiful because as a woman you probably want to have this very masculine name be feminized to make you feel better.
Me: I’m not really sure what else to say, so I’m going to say thank you.
When I was choosing my name, I had a lot of decisions to make. Think about all the decisions behind choosing a newborn’s name, except with the added preconceptions of gender that I now have about myself, and about the society that I live in. I went through every baby name database I could find, went through all of my favorite characters in games, anime, movies, and cartoons, and then picked middle names from them as well. I set up a document where I combined all of these names with my last name and with various middle names like puzzle pieces.
Holden was not my first choice, actually.
Before I was born, my parents thought I was going to be a boy (haaaaaa), and were going to name me Forest John Madagame. Super cool name, as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, I now have a nephew of the same name, so it’s basically off limits.
The names I narrowed things down to afterward were: Rainer, Holden, and Hunter.
Having an ‘H’ name was not a requirement for me, but having two syllables, something sort of earthy or Foresty, and something definitively masculine were requirements. Rainer was actually my top choice, but after talking to a few German friends, I realized that Rainer was not as cool a name in German (sounds something like Willibald in English), and also doesn’t sound as elegant. Sorry Rilke, I tried.
I ended up going with Holden because…well, it suits me, right? It’s not too cool, it’s a little bit weird, and it’s uncommon enough that I feel like I’m not taking someone else’s name. No, I didn’t choose it because of Holden Caulfield, which is what about 50% of people ask. I also didn’t know it was an Australian car until after I revealed my name to my Aussie friends.
I had thought possibly that having a gender neutral name would really suite me, and looked up neutral names almost exclusively for awhile, but realized something important for myself. If someone saw or heard this name, I would want them to think “use male pronouns.” Maybe if I looked different, if my face were a different shape, my hips straighter, or if I was taller, I wouldn’t need this kind of help, but I knew that having a definitively male name would help me out at least part of the time.
That’s what I thought anyway.
As you can see from the above example (which is not an uncommon occurrence I might add), the name doesn’t actually help me that much. Holden only sounds masculine in English. In German (and probably most other languages) it sounds like a foreign name with no particular gender attached to it, just the way I wouldn’t know if Nkeri or Huizhong were male or female names.
My conclusion?
I’ve already picked my name, so I can’t really worry about it too much. Everyone has problems with their names, whether they just don’t like it, it’s too common, it’s very unique, or whether it causes an unwanted ambiguity with their gender identity.
