My deadname feels so distant from me that even when I meet or hear of a person whose name is the same as my deadname, it feels surreal. Like, my deadname has always just been a cue for me to respond to someone, just like how someone saying "Hey!" to catch my attention doesn't mean that "Hey" is like a name to me. I do not have personal association with that name, and I never did. I haven't even legally changed my name yet, but I will do so very soon, and it feels odd for me to remember that my chosen name is not my legal name quite yet. I forgot that it's still not on my ID rather frequently!

same feeling

before i knew i was bigender i wanted to just change it to literally any other girl name (didn't really know what i wanted yet) and my parents got super mad at me, lol

I completely understand where you are coming from and you are not crazy. For me I have complex PTSD because of my traumatic childhood. That means my default model for dealing with trauma is dissociation. So I see parts of myself as different aspects of who I am. One part of myself is the one that has my given name or what people call a deadname. He is one of our protectors and in IFS speak he is a firefighter. That is why I dislike the idea of thinking of him as dead. I know this sounds a little different from what you are experiencing but I figured it was close enough that I would tell you about it. Hopefully you take some comfort in it.

I am lucky enough for most of the names in my ethnic language to be non-gendered.

For me my deadname was mine, I used it and it was a fine name, I just like my new name better :)

Literally no, I never did. People would mispronounce it, it's not super common, and I'd never correct em. People thought my name was another dude name cause they misheard mispronounciations. Never corrected them either. I didn't think much of it at the time, I knew names were important to other people but I literally just never cared.

i didnt really start hating it until i started going by my chosen name. which checks out compared to how ive felt about a ton of other gender things. like i didnt rly realize how much i hated my body hair until it was gone, or my voice until i realized that id subconsciously changed it to be more feminine. basically i just masked so hard that i forgot i was masking. i also have cptsd so that probably contributed to it

My deadname wasn't even a nice name to have. I have always felt it was this shameful piece of clothes I was forced to use. Never liked it, never felt like it was mine. I'm so glad I changed it for a cute name.

I moved my dead name to my middle, but my old middle name always caused intense emotional distress and in hindsight it's almost certainly because of how masculine it was. It never felt like me, way before those feelings had a deeper and more understood origin.

My old first name isn't quite gender neutral, but it's rare as a femme name, and it's normal enough as a feminine middle name and it shows up hyphened a bit - desiring to have my transition mark an evolution, a metamorphosis rather than like, a stark death/rebirth, and keeping the old name but deprecating its primacy was the fitting move for me.

I spit on my dead middle name though. Awful. Fucking disgusting.

No, but it was the name my husk of a body was known by so I had to manage.

My new one has nothing in common with the previous trash

My dead name always felt like a curse word to me. I didn't realize it until I started going by my chosen name, though. Which feels affirming and euphoric to hear :)

I feel weird because my parents were cool enough to give me a name with feminine version I'm very happy with. It did take me for fucking ever to lean into that though.

I generally felt very disassociated with my entire "self" pre-transition including name, body, presentation, socialization. Like the feeling that this thing wasn't me, but something I was forced to pilot.

I still haven't picked a name, so I guess I have an undead name right now. I grew up being called a diminutive/femme-ambiguous version of my first name, which always seemed a little weird in retrospect. I'm probably keeping it as a middle name.

No. I actually ditched it 14 years prior to my egg cracking and went by a pseudonym I created.

Mine didn't either. I liked my dead name, it was a fun name. Unique, fun to say, a bit hard for people around me to pronounce but 2/3 ain't bad. But it didn't feel like it was mine.

It's complicated.

Yes, it did, but also no, because he was a character I played. He was an amalgamation of trying to do it "right", and there's nothing else I would call that time but by that name. It was me.

But in coming out, I've realized that feeling. Of having lived my entire life on a stage, never getting to go behind the curtain and take the costume off, until now. How much I repressed interests, made myself love people I never really did(including myself), until I really got to know myself.

Now, it feels weird to call the pre-out days by my real name, but also like nails on a chalkboard to talk about myself by my deadname. It was mine, up until the point that I got to wake up.

For me, yes. But honestly it's still partially my name and who knows, I might go back to it entirely if everyone just perceives me as a woman.

Yeah I feel this. I don't hate my dead name. It just felt like something else that was assigned to me. Another expectation to fulfill.

I always hated my name even before I was trans.

I remember creating a pseudonym for when my friends and I played smash. It was a masculine pseudonym though

Mine is kind of gender neutral so I have less negative feelings about it then some probably, but I prefer my new one.

I had a nickname instead of using my deadname and really hated it when people used my "full name" and, after starting transition, I cannibalized my nickname so when I write my full name the old nickname is still hiding in there i.e. still part of me.

Ehh not really? I never identified with it that much. I mean, techinically I don't have a deadname, I haven't changed my name yet and I don't know if I want to, but my current name just feels like one that was randomly assigned to me

kinda? i just really fucking hated everyone assuming i was a guy.

i'm in a weird situation because my given name is kinda gender neutral but it would still be unusual for a woman. i think it's okay, although a little miffed that the etymological meaning is masculine. the only concern I used to have about it was it's hard to shorten or nicknameify. now i dunno what i'm gonna do, there are feminine names that are similar but none have really stuck out to me. maybe i'll just keep it rolling?

the only alternative I could think of was just not having a name, which would have been a massive inconvenience.

Had a classmate who I sat with every class for a semester. We never told each other our names. Was great (for reasons I couldn't comprehend at the time). For someone you don't need to talk about in any other contexts, its surprising not inconvenient

I didn't ever really consider changing my name before. I thought it was fine most of the time... except when I was with other people with the same name and I felt sort out of place having that name (or maybe I'd have preferred them to all just change their names or be less masculine). Its not a deadname though.

idk, nobody really ever called me by the name on my birth certificate.