I used to play a ton of online RPGs with a strong focus on actually roleplaying and I pretended I was a girl named Alia. So I'm kind of surprised I never considered that name when I actually came out. In my 20s I started hanging out with an older transwoman who was kind of like my mentor, and she named me Shauna. I ended up back in the closet for about 15 years, but when my egg cracked again a couple of years ago I floated a few options to my partner which the same first initial as my deadname, and she didn't like any of them except Shauna, and to be honest I also liked Shauna the best.

I am cis, but my given name was very aged for my generation and grandmotherly which made me self-conscious as a kid.

When I decided to ditch my name, first I tried using my middle name, but that starts with a different letter and it turns out my brain tunes that out entirely if someone that I wasn't already listening to calls it out. I had to already be engaged in conversation with someone to respond to it, which doesn't work great if someone across the room calls out your name to try to show you something cool. My parents never did the full name scolding so I literally almost never have heard my middle name spoken aloud. My dad even thought I had my deceased sister's middle name the last time I can remember middle names coming up in discussion.

I gave up on the name change for a couple of years, but in high school I decided to give something else a shot. I started using my first initial, but spelled phonetically, for example: K spelled as Kay or L as Elle. That was the solution I needed. If someone shouts it from across the room, my brain alerts just like with my full first name. It's simple, but it works. I've stuck with it for 23 years now.

I highly recommend picking something that has a starting sound similar to your current name so your subconscious brain will still pick up on it, otherwise your friends and family will be shouting your new name over and over to get your attention while you are completely oblivious. My kid is trans and I am going through this now from the opposite end of calling the new name out repeatedly with no response because he also picked a name with no similarity to his given name.

I was working through a list of nature-related names, looking for an uncommon one that still sounded like a real name. I was almost ready to try out "Ember", but then I saw "Hazel" and it just clicked. So that's what I've called myself ever since!

Cis-white-gay here, adopted. Changed my name at 25 to completely dissociate myself from my adoptive "family". Went with a slightly modified version of the name on my original birth records (which I found amidst a bunch of other paperwork that really solidified my decision to leave in the first place -- that is a whole other story). I am who I was born to be, not raised to be.

When I cracked to enby/genderfluid, I wanted a name that was genderneutral. I'm a fan of Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead, so I thought Ash(ley) worked well. Later I cracked again to transfeminine and thought "yeah, that still works."

I didnt know where to look and didnt have any ideas, so I pulled up the list of most popular girls names from my year of birth. It was number 400 something of 500 lol.

I'm non-binary. My first and last names are fine. First name leans gendered but is technically unisex. I'm in the process of changing my middle name from a generic gendered one to either "Moxie" or "Miles". This is because

• I don't want to have to change my initials (smh)
• I feel no affinity towards my middle name
• Miles is best Sonic the Hedgehog character
• Moxie is best soda
• My middle name appears on few documents but my initial appears on many, so fewer things to update.

(Feel free to suggest other less gendered middle names that start with "M" or try to persuade me one way or another)

I looked for astronomy-related names, and ended up choosing the name of an asteroid ((2) Pallas)

I mostly just had some rules for names I wanted to avoid: names of people I knew personally, names that sound weird/unusual in english or swedish (where I'm from).

I considered a bunch of names via the usual methods like baby name lists and random name generators but didn't find one that felt right for me, until one day one just occured to me

Just thought about different names and the one I later chose somehow just felt good

My original name has no male counterpart, so I nerded to forge something anew.

I made a large list of names of my language whose letter started with A (same letter as my old name), didn't have a female counterpart and I liked the pronounciation. Then I risked off the names that only very old people used, which were 75% of the list. The remaining list was about eight names. "Abel" was the most common of them.

I noticed afterwards that my parents (if they weren't transphobic cucks) would have liked this name. When I asked them how they picked my name, they said that they wanted it to start with A, be simple to write, short, with no variant spellings, beautiful, with a good meaning and not too common. Also, they're christians.

I heard the name as a kid and I always knew it was my name internally. As a kid, I always daydreamt of a pretty girl in an overcast field with the wind blowing against her hair. I decided her name was Leyla. It wasn't until I came out that I understood that the girl was me, and had always been me.

I've always had a list of names I liked for several purposes but when I heard the name I chose for myself, I became completely obsessed with it and was sad it wasn't my name. But then I realized there was no reason it couldn't be XD

I wanted my first name to be something easy for my family to adjust to, and chose my middle name because it spoke to me. Now I've learned my middle name is a family name, and my family and all my friends call me by my middle name, so my first name is relegated to official business only. It is a convenient way to identify scams very quickly :)

They're all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won't go into detail since it's generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was "the (opposing) version of [Name]" (eg "Francine is the feminine of Frank").

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was 'very gender' (eg: if Frank were to mean "buff and hairy"), so it was confusing if the opposing version's meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.