Several weeks ago, I spoke with a transgender woman in one of the local gay bars. This amazing woman is about 74years old and has become an outspoken activisit.

She asked me if I'd chosen a fem name, although I'd explained that I didn't view myself as male to female. So, I responded no.

Within the last several days, I've started to feel that I do want another name. Not a fem name but a gender neutral one.

So, during a training session today, when I should have been paying attention and learning all kinds of exciting things on financial payables transactions, tax laws and invoice matching, a friend and I went searching for gender neutral names on babynames.com. My searching for a name on this site seems totally natural. In a very real way, I feel like I'm being reborn.

This until recently completely uninteresting but now totally fascinating site lists not only boys names and girls names, but unisex names, as well. Until my friend led me through its pages, I was considering the rather mundane but totally acceptable Lee. I like the sound of it. I'll admit that his first suggestions of Cactus and Massachusetts didn't appeal to me. I am finding it interesting to consider all the possibilities, though, and all of these names do have meaning for some people.

What I'm thinking of is legally changing my first name. It's not something I'm going to rush into but the possibility is definitely there. I've already gotten input from two other coworkers and my boss!

Hark! I hear the strains of Saturday Night Live! Androgynous Pat! No?

Lee is a good name. Choose carefully, keeping in mind that you are the only one you need please. Take it from one who has carried more than one name - no matter which name you use, someone will not like it, or refuse to use it. I was born to one, grew up with another, but answered to yet a third, and I am back at the original. Same shit with last names. A damned walking identity crisis - oops, sounds familiar.

Good luck!

You are very funny, Kristoff Someone at work mentioned this Androgynous Pat from SNL. I only have a very vague memory of him/her. I suppose I'm simply too young to remember. Do you think?? I'll have to do a little research on the SNL web site.

My nickname is already my second incarnation. I seriously doubt that anyone in my family, with the notable exception of my niece, will use any name I choose. My sister-in-law recently gave some tentative indication that she'd be willing to try calling me by my chosen name, which is in fact what 98.4135 % of the people in my life call me. Not at all sure she'll ever get there.

My relatives -- other than my immediate family -- all called me by my boyhood nickname, one I haven't used since I was twelve, which was TOO many years ago. My 90+ uncle and some of my cousins still refer to me by that name. Good luck on getting such people to change.

Slammr (imported) wrote: Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:13 pm My relatives -- other than my immediate family -- all called me by my boyhood nickname, one I haven't used since I was twelve, which was TOO many years ago. My 90+ uncle and some of my cousins still refer to me by that name. Good luck on getting such people to change.

Do we have the same family??? I'm also of the Medicare generation and ALL of my surviving aunts and uncles (as well as a few cousins) still call me by a childhood nickname that I otherwise abandoned when I was still in elementary school.

Any name change will be accepted by some and ignored by others. It's for YOU and your own comfort and peace of mind. Don't worry about the rest.

Try Danny Spell It Danny Or Dannie Male Or Female

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisex_name) has a list of epicene names.

One name it lists is Evelyn. This reminds me of a scene in “Lost in Translation” wherein Kelly (who has signed into the hotel under the name Evelyn Waugh) is scorned by Charlotte who says “Evelyn Waugh is a man.” Actually, the first wife—a woman, by the way—of Evelyn Waugh, the author, was also named Evelyn.

"Eunice" is nice.

At least she has been nice to me.

May all TS's and TG's be so ... oh, oh, oh ... nice.

One thing I have learned, though, is that I would not recommend a legal name change to "NaziNuts" as I have got some reputation point dings for that name -- even though I am not actually a Nazi. A Nut, yes probably, but not, not, not a Nazi, just fascinated by those SOB's.

Anyhow, by any and all names, I luvs u all here.

Everyone, except those who have left silent negative feedback, have been so nice to this new Participating Member.



From NaziNuts, not one of the former, just the latter, and never a hater, or so I hope.

P.S. Send money and positive reputation comments if so inclined. I prefer the Euro. I can make change for anyone (M-F or F-M or M-E). I believe in sanity and vanity. One of those might show.

Indeed, NaziNuts, Eunice makes a lot of sense.

I, too, feel love for the folks here. This is a place where I feel safe and accepted. A place that just a few short months ago felt, in many ways, foreign to me.

I'll admit it, sometimes I've been fascinated by the Nazis too. I suspect it has something to do with how the transcendent and unbelievable cruelty can exist in the same society, even the same individuals.

I'm really getting off topic here because music, especially, but also literature and the visuals arts are cores parts of who I am. Much of what I'm doning in the Archive is revealing exactly who I am.

Maybe I can somehow tie these things into a new name! Since I will view any new name as an important statement of who I am, the following discussion may not be so off-topic after all.

I'm not a historian, let alone a musical historian, so I may not get all this exactly right, but I'm trying I'm also not taking the time to check the details. The Germans at the time of WWII were the most educated people on Earth. They had a long history of achieving the sublimest heights in the arts, expecially music and literature/poetry.

Over a century before the WWII, there was the other-worldly Beethoven, who initially dedicated his third symphony, the 'Eroica' (that's for 'heroic, I believe, not erotic!), to Napoleon but later withdrew that as he came to realize that man's true nature. Beethoven used part of Friedrich Schiller's 'Ode tp Joy' as the basis of the last movement of his monumental Ninth Symphony, which speaks directly to the brotherhood of all. Beethoven refused to bow to royalty, unlike his friend the poet Goethe, saying they were no better than he.

Before Beethoven there was JSBach, who many in a position to know consider the greatest composer of all time. He wrote not only sublime sacred music but secular music of unsurpassed originality and energy.

Brahms, toward the end of his life in the late 1800's was writing of his concern over the rising anti-Semitism he was observing in his homeland.

His contemporary (although the two were diametrically opposed in compositional style and philosophy), the music-dramatist and German nationalist Richard Wagner, was blatantly anti-semitic. A section of one of my favorite Wagner operas, "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg", was practically used as a Nazi national anthem.

So, long before the time of WWII, we've got these very well-educated, cultured Germans becoming increasingly anti-semitic and intolerant of those not viewed as fitting the Aryan ideal. If even the best educated people up to that time can tolerate and, in some cases, participate in such unimaginable cruelties of the Holocaust, I sometimes wonder what hope is there for real, lasting justice in the world.

I have a very recent European heritage. My father was from Germany. At times I've felt absolutely appalled that I've got this German heritage. A Jewish friend has told me I shouldn't feel this way because I was in no way involved. The things is, though, I don't know that any one of us can truly say we would have behaved much differently if we had lived in Germany at that time.

There are some outstanding examples of individuals standing by their principles during the war even if it meant prison. Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind. A Lutheran clergyman, theologian and member of the resistance movement, he was killed by the Nazis as the Allies were in the process of liberated the country.

Of course, there were individuals who stood up to their countrymen in less dramatic, but still effective, ways. There were certainly many individuals whose names we will never know who never abandoned their principles and humanity for the sake of their own safety.

When I've watched TV specials on the horrors of the holocaust, I had to turn away and I was shamed that some of my German ancestors may very well have been involved in these atrocities.

Sorry, I'm getting way too serious here and I can't continue.

All I want to say is that I, too, despite my genuine horror at the German Holocaust and similar crimes against humanity at other times and in other places, can at times still find myself fascinated and feel a strange attraction for certain parts of the Nazis.

I can acknowledge, although I'm not at all happy about it, that I truly have no way of knowing what I would have done had I lived in Germany during that horrendous time.

My next post on this thread will list some names I'm considering for this new being I'm becoming.

I don't think you need to do a thing. I used to know a woman named Todd.