My biggest transition mistake

I don’t have many regrets related to my transition, except a specific one about my legal name change.

Irreversible changes

I made a lot of irreversible transition choices, some small and some big. Strangely, my first one dates back from long before my “official” transition. I had dozens of laser hair removal sessions on my legs and chest in France, years before suspecting I was trans. I just “felt” I wanted my body to look less masculine. The legs' hair removal was a huge success (my legs look smooth now), the chest hair grew back but went away after taking HRT.

By the way, I know that cis women have hair on their legs too (although less than men on average), but we trans women have so many aspects of our body that look too masculine that we often want to compensate for them.

Then, just one year before realising I was trans, I felt a stronger push to feminise my body, and in addition to dyeing my hair in purple again, I got several cute tattoos. Now we are talking about serious irreversible changes here!

A tattoo I got to make my appearance cuter and more feminine

So, I committed to irreversible changes long even before realising I was transitioning. People often think of HRT (hormones) as the first irreversible choice in transition. In reality, breast growth is really the single irreversible effect of HRT that would stay even if I stopped taking it. Breasts don’t un-grow (trans men wish they did!) when going off estrogen, but fat redistribution and hair growth would slowly revert on the other hand.

What about my name change then?

Here I had a “happy accident” and an unhappy one with the same root cause.

When I decided to change my name, I still identified as non-binary, and I had not understood yet that I was a trans woman. I therefore looked for a name that was gender-neutral. I looked for popular non-binary names, among which you have names like Ash, Sage, Atlas, Quinn… and River. "River” specifically resonated with me (see my previous article about my name change). I have since heard about 4 other non-binary people with the name River, so it’s a pretty popular name in the trans/enby community.

So that’s the happy accident. Because I identified as non-binary, I allowed myself to choose a completely different name from my birth name, instead of feeling the pressure to just feminise my birth name for simplicity.

Even though I don’t identify as non-binary anymore, I really like the name River, it has several special meanings to me, and it “feels like me”.

So what’s the problem then? The problem is when I changed my legal name, I had to choose what to do with my middle name. My previous middle name was a masculine name that basically nobody heard about, because in France middle names don’t appear anywhere other than on ID (and you can have several in fact, like second name, third name, fourth name…). I had no imagination to create a new middle name, so I thought: Since it will be hard or perhaps infeasible to change my name in France, let’s make it less confusing, in case I have documents from both countries with the old and new legal names…

So, I had this terrible idea: Let my middle name be my deadname!

What’s wrong about it?

I think that because the bank's clerk who opened my account was also an immigrant, they did not record my middle name as part of my full name. So I was under the illusion that middle names did not matter much in Canada either. Also, I did not really notice when it appeared because my middle name would not strike me as strange back then.

My legal name change took a total of 5 months, and by the time I got the certificate, I had already realised I was a woman; but it was too late. I then did all the necessary follow-up changes, IDs, bank account, etc. which propagated the change everywhere.

However, the problem soon became clearly apparent. River is a gender-neutral name, so if people refer to me as “River [deadname] Champeimont”, it feels overall like a masculine name.

Also, now that I identify as a woman, it feels deeply wrong to have my masculine deadname show up everywhere. I did not realise it when I was earlier in my transition because at the time my deadname still felt like it was me, which is not the case anymore after one year of using my new name River.

Now I have “River [deadname] Champeimont” written on my credit card, all emails from banks start with “Hi River [deadname]” and on the phone I’m sometimes asked “Is it River [deadname]?”.

What feels especially annoying to me is it feels like it disambiguates whether River is feminine/masculine/non-binary in the wrong direction, like if it was “Hello River - masculine version”.

What am I going to do about it?

Overall, I feel deeply frustrated about having my deadname appended to my new name everywhere like this, so here is what I’m going to do about it: I’m filing another legal name change to change my middle name only.

I asked my parents what name they would have given me if I was assigned female at birth. This name is Adèle. I really like that name and it feels like a name that could be mine.

That’s why I filed a new name change so that my legal name becomes “River Adèle Champeimont”. I hope it works!

In conclusion, don’t get the impression that I’m frustrated with my transition because of this issue. Although I regret this specific point, overall most of my transition steps have been a success, and my quality of life has massively improved with transitioning. Now that I’ve lived in the post-transition world, I can’t imagine going back to my previous life! And the good thing is this mistake is not an irreversible one.

So see you soon with I hope news of success!