I'm not super sure what else to call it, but I've had a weird experience with my name recently and I wanted to see if anyone else had a similar experience. It took me a really long time to properly settle on a name, playing with a few in the four years between my egg cracking and me starting to transition (in fact I was still going by my birth name when I came out to a lot of people privately). Eventually, just before coming out to my parents, I thought I'd settled on double-barrelling my birth name*, making it Adam-Elizabeth, shortening it casually but having that as my legal name, which is exactly what I did; that's the name on all my properly legal things, ID, bank account, etc. I'd still felt some connection to the birth name, primarily because people I was out to had kept using it because I hadn't changed it yet, and it sort of stopped sounding like a man's name. That is still true, I still don't really see it like that.

When I first changed my name, I wasn't really sure how I wanted people to refer to me; some people, both positively and just using it, and negatively (i.e. my parents flat out refusing to call me anything else, before I told them that (at the time) I was fine with that anyway), kept using my birth name, some people used the full thing (which is obviously pretty long). Eventually, after a conversation with the head of HR at the charity I volunteer for, I decided to primarily go by Elizabeth casually, and make that a bit clearer.

But in the couple of months since I started to do that, I've found that my connection that I still felt towards my birth name has disappeared a bit, and it's clearly doing that for others as well - my best friend told me yesterday that at this point I'm entirely 'Elizabeth' to her, which felt so incredible to hear, but, along with a weekend of people calling me Elizabeth/Liz at Trans Pride, I've realised I know don't really want to keep the birth name around.

In the end, it's felt like that full 'Adam-Elizabeth' was sort of a transitional thing, a way to bridge things while I started getting used to being Elizabeth. It's something that my coworker actually asked about, if that was the thought, and I said no at the time, but now I think it's actually yes... But there's so much that makes that awkward; in hindsight, keeping my birth name as a part of it might have been a bit of attempt to placate my parents, so knowing that hasn't worked makes it feel a little redundant (although I have kept my original middle name, along with taking a new one, which isn't something I regret). I changed my facebook to just Elizabeth a couple of days ago, and I'm definitely worried about that causing an argument with my parents; changing it again legally to fully drop 'Adam' would cause even more... And there's also the fact that I've just gone through all the faff of changing my name, and even though I wish I could get everything changed to just Elizabeth on things like my bank card and ID, I don't know if I fancy going through all that hassle a second time just months after I did it already.

But yeah, I was just wondering if anyone else had a similar experience to this, or STILL has that kind of combined name. It's not something I've really seen before, so I'm interested to hear about other's experiences.

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*Obviously know that's not how people generally talk about it; even after completely leaving it behind, I don't personally connect with the term deadname, so I don't use it referring to myself - obviously super valid for everyone who does use it though! Just wanted to be clear.