How do you pronounce 'Nat'?
Published on 2024-06-02
Content warning: references to transphobia
A few years ago, I came across this website by a guy named Iain, almost certainly lost to time. On his front page, he had a hilariously angry paragraph about how people constantly and confidently asserted to him that his name was Lain. He seemed dumbfounded that, even though Iain might be a slightly less common variation on the name Ian, people would conflate it with the considerably less common name Lain, which sounded completely different. Of course, when I read that, a million neurons fired in my brain all at once as I realized he must have never heard of Serial Experiments: Lain, which is, besides this guy, fairly well recognized among computer nerds. People go by the name Lain on the internet all the time in veneration of her. It certainly didn't help that his website used a font that made a capital "I" look identical to a lowercase "L".
It was really interesting to think how different of a universe this person lived in compared to me. I hadn't watched Serial Experiments: Lain until a year or two ago, but I was always kind of passively aware of it's existence in the subculture. It had a really profound impact in its time, and that impact persists to this day. But I guess not everybody's into anime. Most people probably aren't. And if you'd never heard of Lain, you'd probably be extremely confused why people would think you share a name with her.
I kind of have a similar problem. About half of the people I meet think my name is Nate.
Usually, if I tell people my name is Nat, even if I spell it out for them, they'll correct it in their head to Mat, which I then need to awkwardly talk them out of. Usually, even after they get the spelling right, it won't be long before they'll mentally tack an "E" on the end, which I'll then need to awkwardly talk them out of as well. I can understand Matt a little more, since it's a more common name, but Nate always confused me quite a bit. Well, it never really confused me as to why people do it, but I always wanted to be confused by it. It's a bit easier that way.
My working theory (and this theory is pretty hard to test earnestly, so it'll likely stay that way) is that people have a really hard time believing someone who looks and sounds like me would have such a feminine name. Evidence for this theory includes the fact that when people get it wrong, they usually start out getting it right. It's only after they see me, or hear my voice, that the imaginary E reveals itself to them. There are masculine people who share my name (Nat King Cole comes to mind, and he was one of the people I thought of when I chose it), but where I come from, Nat's a pretty feminine name. It's usually short for Natalie or Natasha. I always thought Natasha was a pretty name growing up, and I chose Nat explicitly because it had a very feminine ring to it. So I guess what stresses me out so much about people changing my name to Nate is that whether or not they realize it, to change my name so is to explicitly deny me the femininity I worked so hard to embody through it.
The existential horror of being transgender
But otherwise, my problem really isn't all that unlike the case of Iain, and I think that's what makes it so complicated. One of the many things that makes being transgender so hard is the epistemic violence of constantly being surrounded by people who struggle to understand even very basic things about your nature and experience, if they're aware of it at all. Transfems are surrounded by people who see them as weirdly dressed gay men every day. Reactionary feminists have given transmen hell over being "confused lesbians" for decades. It's an assault on all fronts, all the time. Simultaneously, I struggle to fault people for not understanding and not being super sensitive to these problems. Do most people have a lot of work to do? Yes. Are most people not doing enough? Probably. But it's nobody's fault that they grew up under a patriarchal regime with oppressive, colonial gender norms.
In many ways, the difference between me and most cisgender people is not that unlike the difference between Iain and the leagues of Serial Experiments: Lain fans who keep getting his name wrong. We live in two separate worlds of experience.
I suppose what matters now is how we're working to bridge that gap.
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