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Important addendum:

@nonbinarysunstreaker​

Wholesome :D

optimus pride

This photo always cheers me up a bit. It’s a front-page article from 1955 about Christine Jorgensen, one of the first women to have sex-reassignment surgery.

Since the text is a bit small and I couldn’t find a larger copy, here’s what the small blurb says:

A World of a Difference

This article is 58 years old, and it’s more respectful of Christine’s pronoun choices and name than some publications are today. It makes me happy to see a newspaper be respectful of a trans person’s choice of name and pronouns like that :3

Say it again for the haters in the back who want to keep pretending that trans people, or even treating trans people with respect is even remotely anything new. 😎

It’s worth mentioning, that this was kinda celebrated as a wonder of the atomic age at the time. “Look at the power of our scientists! Look at what we can do!” You know, back when America was trying to be the leader in scientific advancement.

I wrote a whole paper on her!

Trans Names

Since I’m giving out writing advice I wanna talk about something that’s been on my mind lately.  I’ve seen a couple posts going around about the “Dos and Don’ts of Trans Characters” and a lot of it is sound advice!  But now that I think back on it, I dwell a lot on the points they would make about names.

“You can’t have a girl who’s deadname was Stephen be called Stephanie” is the type of thinking that eliminates the possibility that a trans person might be really attached to their name.  My name is pretty feminine, but I love it.  It’s unique, it’s special, it means a lot to me, so I don’t want to change it.  I don’t even mind people using my full name, even though I generally go by a nickname.  It doesn’t make me any less trans.

And I wouldn’t even say I’m a minority either.  I’ve met two girls whose names were extremely similar to their deadnames, one of which even legally changed her name.  I don’t know why they decided they wanted similar names, but again it doesn’t make them less trans.

I guess just keep in mind that people have reasons for doing things.  I have a trans character who changed his name so drastically from his deadname that he made sure that it sounded completely different AND had none of the same letters, because he wanted to distance himself from anyone ever thinking he was a girl.  It was a small source of control he could have, ensuring that he had a name that couldn’t be mistaken for a girl, based on the situation he was in.

But then I have a woman who didn’t change her name at all, because she’s IN a position of power and all she had to do was establish to the people around her that she’s a woman.  She never had to worry about being misgendered, so she didn’t feel the need to part from her name.

Characters should be just as complicated and varied as real life people.  Think about your character’s motivations and their relationship with their name instead of just taking advice to never make a character’s name similar to their deadname.  We do exist, after all.

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