Naming Oneself
A trans epistemology doesn’t demand fidelity to a given name, but rather to the process of naming itself
(Dickinson 2021)
Seven years ago, I changed my name from Joshua (my birth name) to Rowan. In a deeply passé Lacanian moment, I awoke one morning, looked into the mirror, and had the sudden realisation that Rowan fitted me better. It seemed at the time to come out of nothingness, and yet was formed in the crucible of my community. I told my girlfriend at the time and heard her repeat what I had spoken into the mirror back to me, building up the first tendrils of the relational web that gives meaning to the process of naming. Over the next year, I expanded that relational web to my close friends, to my family, and found myself butting up against the systemic powers that were, at the time, dominating my life — the clinic, the university. In one particularly memorable moment, I wore a sprig of Rowan in my lapel during an ecology field trip to actively, materially name myself to my peers. The process of re-naming myself was done in concert with other queer and trans people, and points to the ways in which all transitions are (like a mirror) dialectically individual and collective (both one individual looking, and a relational repeat of the individual looking back).
We might think past a psychoanalytic frame to see transitioning as labouring: Zoe Belinsky, in Transgender Marxism, argues that “labour, by constituting the milieu into which the human being projects her body, coordinates the terms in which making and unmaking are possible” (185). My milieu when I was first transitioning was a mostly middle class, politically radical, exclusively queer and trans circle within an institution of immense privilege. And my naming reflected that — I’d first gotten the idea for ‘Rowan’ from a squatter I used to run around with, who seemed to embody just the gender I was reaching out for: practical, good in crises, politically sound, unabashedly queer and feminist etc. I have no idea what that other Rowan is doing nowadays-that milieu fell apart for me after a few years-and in the gap left by those friends, I have tried to build up a new relationality of gender, a collective to enact “the felt labour and traces of making” (Vaccaro 2015). In writing this, I want to point to the failure of the standard narratives of trans naming which place it in a purely individualist frame, rather than being a relational process built up by the collective.
Since my first re-naming, my gender has shifted dramatically: pivoting around dykehood more than womanhood; boyish butchness more than nonbinary femmeness; trans as an orientation unto itself more than simply a direction of identity. Through that revision of my self, the name Rowan has stuck with me, haunting my gender-sexuality with its ambiguousness, its queer ecology, its ability to be tightened up into Ro, or draw out slowly into Rowan Isabella Davis- there is a capaciousness to that naming that I adore. It’s curious how trans naming practices are often simultaneously a mode of making your gender legible to your communities and to state-power, and can be a way to undercut that legibility with ungendered, monosyllabic, proper nouns. And I’ve always drawn a power in my nonbinaryness with that. But over the past two years I’ve felt a pull away from nonbinaryness as the operating system of my gender, and into a self-framing of myself as primarily a dyke. As a dyke that came up on Wittig, I am always already un-binarised by my sexuality because of my divestment from heterosexual economic orders. And recognising that has simultaneously made me more invested in my own dykehood, with its uneasy affinity to womanhood as the hidden definitional term, and far less invested in trans taxonomies of gender.
This re-hierarchisation of Trans > Woman > Dyke into Dyke > Trans > Woman has led to a stark change in my outward expression of my gendered sexuality, opening up transfeminine boyhood/boydykery, extracting elements of my former faggotry to enact a dykefag camp butchness. And with this, the name Rowan has lost some of its punch.
The important part is the process of naming itself, not the name, and as my gender-sexuality has shifted over the past seven years, so too has my name been iteratively performed in relation to the collective labouring of my transition. As I’ve needed the name to do the work of making me illegible less, as my gendercraft has started to do that more and more for me, I’ve needed a more assimilably woman-ish name to bounce my queerness off. Taking the cue of the main character of the video game Celeste, a game that was for a long time an autistic special interest, I have settled on Madeline. For me, the character of Madeline, who is both transfeminine and mentally ill, illustrates the need to confront parts of yourself that you repress, to struggle collectively, to engage with the explosive, vibrant materiality of the world. And in that collective labouring of climbing Celeste mountain, I see a reflection of my own gender, something constructed in the multiple.
And so, 26 years after I was handed the name Joshua, and 7 years after I constructed the name Rowan, I am now breathing life into the name Madeline, in order to reflect the continuing re/post-transitioning I’ve experienced over the past two years. The name itself is not particularly important but the process of continually re-naming oneself is the essence of transition — forcing a world that violently opposes our existence to reflect your place in/out of the gender order, collectively, relationally, and so vibrantly.
Programming Note: I will be using Madeline (shortenings tba) for my personal / private life, but will be retaining Ro/Rowan for my academic/professional/public life
Bibliography
Dickinson, Nathaniel. 2021. “Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology.” In Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, 204–18. Pluto Press.
Vaccaro, Jeanne. 2015. “Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter.” GLQ 21 (2–3). https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843347.
Wittig, Monique. 1976. “The Straight Mind.” In The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Beacon Press.
