What's in a name , Name Stories and the like

Well what is in a name ? for many people they go through life never considering that the name, especially their  given/first/fore name they were given by their parents is anything other than permanent and unchanging.

So who isn't it  permanent and unchanging for ?

Performers; whether for  marketability reasons  (here's looking at you Marnie Mercedes Darcey Pemberton Crittle )

or because of  the rules about performers names  'enforced' by Equity , Spotlight and similar organisations around the world.

Immigrants; especially  if your  name is  deemed as complex or hard to pronounce by the place you are moving too, this can be further complicated by  the conventions of structuring  names and a certain colonialism in the way  some places record and even allocate names. 


and of course those  of use who are trans and find the name we were given to be  wrong or because gatekeepers require  a change to 'demonstrate commitment'.)

What is a 'Name Story'?

A name story is how you got the name you use... so for many people it's a simple one liner "it's the name my parents gave me"...

However of the three groups above the story can be much more interesting. Sadly my name story is fairly boring - If I had been assigned female at birth I would have been named Nicola Jane.

So why is Nicola Jayne called Nicola Jayne?

One of the 'missed signs' of my transness was that at a fairly early age I asked what my name would be if i was a girl. When i first realised I was trans I started  to use Nicola as my name, and it fit well and felt comfortable, so when the moment came to make the step of doing my deed poll and changing my name in various legal senses, Nicola Jayne it was ... the Y in Jayne being a nod to the variant spelling of my dead name.

here's an interesting  site from the ONS about the popularity of names

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