thought i’d share this as my boyfriend thought it would be funny. before i worked anything out with my gender, i was pretty solid on my pansexual identity. right around november 2019, i decided to start playing minecraft again, and my username ended up being something along the lines of “pan_panic.”

a fun joke, a silly pun, but i didn’t know what would be happening next. i found a server with a discord chat, and so my discord chat became pan_panic as well. so did many other usernames down the line and over the next 3 years.

i was really starting to come to grips with my gender, being nonbinary/transfem. and by that time, my friends didn’t know my actual name at the time, my now deadname. so instead of calling me by my full name, the just called me pan.

while in the process of picking a name, one of my friends asked me, “when you pick a name, will we still be allowed to call you pan?” well shit, i’d gotten so used to everyone calling me that that the name just kind of stuck permanently.

long story short i’ve just begun the process of legally changing my name to pan, based on a minecraft username that was derived from my sexuality.