Tried a few out before landing on my name. I went by another name for a couple months that just never really felt right. Then I found my name and every single person in my life was like "it's perfectly you". People still say that after they've known me for a while haha. I'm pretty sure I found the actual name just by scrolling through a name list. It jumped out at me right away and I was really really happy when I told my friends and they first started using the name for me.

I am no-contact with family and hated my given name, so I didn't have the option of most of the suggestions here.

I went through a list of names common in my age group and birth area and stripped out the ones I didn't want for initials. Then I bounced them off my spouse until we got a short list. I asked those who knew I was out to use them, and put them in as my preferred name for appointments.

It turns out all that work was pointless. We had a random night where we were doing something completely unrelated and my spouse said something that I misheard as my new name and it just stuck! Now my legal paperwork is done and I am just waiting for the courts to finish their side of it.

Was high, and reading the journal. Phased on the name of somebody and then choose.

It was like "Yeah... this one, I like it"

I wanted a powerful name to strike fear in the hearts of the people that wronged me.

i went through a ton of baby name sites specifically looking for names popular in a certain time frame (since it gave me a little more euphoria like "that's who i've always been")

in the end, i went with katherine, because i loved katie but i wanted a fuller version, and elizabeth for my middle name because my mum originally had the name bethany if i was afab and i wanted to use it in my name since she was the first person i told :)

I actually knew what my name was going to be more than a decade before I transitioned. The first time I had ever heard it I sort of latched onto it, somehow I never met anyone else with the name (it's not a particularly uncommon name) but it always stuck with me.

So when I started thinking about socially transitioning it was sort of a no-brainer, it felt like my "real" name had been there waiting for me all along. I know that must sound trite and cliche and not at all helpful but it was a really affirming moment in the process for me.

I asked my parents what names they were thinking of before the genital reveal and just picked one. I think the limited choices helped me actually commit to one.

I looked up names with meanings that spoke to me, then when I had a few I asked my bestie to help me narrow them down. She also made a gender neutral nickname out of my first name, which is what I usually go by. I love that I get to use a name she picked!

You might like my middle name, it means "island goddess", but most English speaking people have no idea how to pronounce it lol

Went for something that meant a lot to me that sounded beautiful.

Pretty much it, really.

I used to use a (female) nickname for anonymity sake on the internet sometimes and it kinda grew on me...

Since I liked both that nickname and by dead name somewhat, I decided that I'd try a mix between the 2 names and it sorta worked but I was never really convinced. That was until I was going through some old google accounts of mine and noticed that I had a profile pic of a character from a game that I really liked and was incredibly similar to the mix between my nick- and dead name (and could be considered gender neutral).

The only issue was: since it's a very uncommon name, not only did no one know how to spell it, there was also a very good chance that the responsible government agency for name changing stuff would outright reject the name because for some reason you can't have a uncommon/strange name (the rules are extremely vague).

So while that game char name grew on me for a year, I basically had to come up with the name that I actually took within like 2 weeks because of other regulatory issues...

So I picked a pretty common name where I can say "oh, please use [game char name] as a nickname". Don't get me wrong, I quite like the name I took but especially with friends/family it just feels way too serious in comparison. With most people even at work I go by the game char name as a nickname tho and I love it ( ᵔ▽ᵔ)

Edit: I also thought about using the female version of my middle name - Valentina, but I have too many bad memories of getting made fun of my former middle name... Now that I think about it tho, I might add Valentina back as a middle name in the future

https://behindthename.com/random