Thus far, while I have sometimes used my own experiences as examples or perspective for various subjects, nothing I have posted on here was especially personal. Everything was focused on some other concept or person besides myself. But some recent chatter on Twitter inspired me to say a bit more about my name, which has more story and thought behind it than some.
Thorne is my assigned-at-birth first name. Though, as I’ve seen my trans comrades experience dead naming more and more, I’m glad that I took the route that I did, my reason for keeping it was far more simple: I love it. It’s unique. It’s bold and strong. It enables me to make weird puns about Poison power ballads and (as I’ve discovered more recently) being a defender of the DSA.
There are only two problems I’ve ever run into with it. The first has largely blown over and something that honestly, today, if someone used against me, I would laugh at and own: bullies growing up calling me “Horny Thorney.”
The other is that I studied abroad in Japan when I was fifteen. I’m still close with my host family, and we have spent time together since. But my name is not linguistically easy for the native Japanese speaker. The closest katakana approximation effectively equates to “So”-“Oh”-“On” all run into one syllable. Japanese tends to have short, choppy syllables, usually only ending with a consonant sound if it is an “n” or if they are, as is common colloquially, dropping a “u” at the end of a word (e.g. most Japanese people pronounce “desu” as “dess.”)
Given this, I decided to replace my middle dead name…? dead middle name…? whatever you want to call it that would be something easier for them to call me. However, I was concerned that picking something blatantly Japanese would open me up to accusations of being a weaboo or a cultural appropriator.
I have a deep and respectful appreciation for Japanese culture, and part of my username (“enso”) is a reference to a Japanese symbol of Zen Buddhism. My parents are atheists, and I was raised in a non-religious household. This left me in search of something to fill the spiritual void, and studying abroad Japan exposed me the opportunity to go and meditate under the guidance of monks who would slap me with wooden sticks called keisaku if my meditation was not up to par.
That said, I’m still a white girl, and being, say, Thorne Sakura Melcher, as much as I love cherry blossoms, would not feel my place in a number of ways. Naomi offered a balance of being something that was fairly common among white women while still providing them something that is also familiar to Japanese ears.
Melcher is also an assigned-at-birth name, though obviously that is a lot more common with last names of people who a trans. Almost everyone I encounter gets the pronunciation wrong, viewing it as a less ridiculous version of the Bobs Burgers family name, Belcher. However, it is a corrupted form of “Melchior,” which many will recognize as one of the names traditionally associated—but only centuries after the Bible—with the three magi who visited Jesus. The “ch” is a hard “k” sound, making it pronounced like “Melker.”
If you’re still reading to this point, I don’t have any kind of witting concluding statements that brilliantly sum up how everything that went into my name meant something, but thank you for indulging my momentary descent into something far more self-centered.