Why I’ve Always Hated Meeting People with the Same Name as Me
They made me painfully aware of the way I am perceived by others.
I can’t remember ever really liking my name.
For most of my life, I thought it was fine. Whenever I spent too much time thinking about it, something felt strangely off, but I could ignore that feeling if I wanted to.
Whenever I met someone with the same name as me, I was filled with a slimy sense of disgust that I couldn’t quite put into words. At first, I thought that maybe it was just the feeling of meeting someone else with a fairly uncommon name. But if that were the case, I probably would have disliked the other person, not myself. In these situations, my discomfort was always turned inward.
It wasn’t until this past week that I discovered the reason why — gender dysphoria.
I work in an office, and the company I work for has recently started having most people come in for two-day-a-week rotations. Someone new started working there. Someone with not only my same rotation schedule but with my same first name: Ellie.
Or, rather, it’s the name I’ve been called for most of my life until I realized I was transgender and needed to transition. Only a few people in my life know that I go by Danny now, so most of my coworkers think that there are now two people named Ellie at the company.
And it makes my skin crawl.
It’s not that I hate this Ellie or any Ellie I’ve met. It’s that meeting a woman or girl with my name forces me to confront the fact that others see me as a woman or girl.
For most of my life, I’ve ignored or concealed anything about my appearance that gave other people the impression that I was a girl. Meeting another person with my name — a girl who was fully aware of and content with the fact that she was a girl — terrified me because I couldn’t just avoid it. This was a human being with thoughts and feelings of her own. I had to come face to face with the reality that the gender people perceive me as does not match the gender I actually am.
I haven’t spoken to the other Ellie at my job yet; she’s in a whole different department, one that rarely works directly with mine. But still, knowing that there’s another Ellie — a woman — makes me deeply uncomfortable with the fact that most of my coworkers think I’m cisgender. It made me realize that I want to come out as trans at work sooner rather than later.
I’m cautiously optimistic about how it will go. I have a coworker in my department who came out as nonbinary last year and it went pretty well. I even came out to my parents and siblings last weekend since I knew I’d want to tell them before I told most of my coworkers. It went about as well as it possibly could have.
I’ve chosen a new name for myself that is much more common than my old name. There’s actually already another Daniel at the company, but hearing his name does not give me intensely awful dysphoria. He’s in a different department from me and the other Ellie, and, like me, he mostly keeps to himself, but we’ve talked a couple of times and he seems cool.
I recently passed my two-year anniversary at this job, and most people know me as the only Ellie at the company. Once I come out, I have a feeling that I will instead be known as “the trans person” (or another not-so-nice term for trans folks) in most of their minds. But honestly, being called those things would probably hurt much less than continuing to be called a name that no longer suits me, if it ever even did.
Although I am still terrified to move forward with my transition, I know that it’s what I have to do.
