How to Change Your Name 3 Times
A story of transition, family estrangement, and academic achievement
This Is Us
A story of transition, family estrangement, and academic achievement
I have a lot to say about names. Like most writers who’ve dabbled in fiction, I’ve spent ages trawling baby name websites, diving into the meaning and vibe given off by a particular array of syllables. And as someone who has been active in chat rooms, forums, and on social media since 1998, I have considered and tried on many labels and pseudonyms for myself.
Then there’s the fact that I’ve changed my own legal name twice. Three times, if you count when I got my PhD.
And I do count it. Getting a doctorate changed my prefix, the way people address me, the way that I go about correcting people for misgendering me. “It’s Dr. Price, actually” goes down a lot smoother than “I’m not a Ms., because I’m not a woman.” Dr. is what shows up before my name on airline tickets and pins on my lapel at academic events. Changing it altered how the world legally refers to me, so I count it as a legal name change.
It also creates a nice symmetry. My three name changes trifurcate my entire adult life up to this point, split it cleanly into three particular eras of rebellion and identity. I changed my last name when I was 18. I got my PhD when I was 25. And when I was 30, I changed my first name as part of my gender transition.
From 2006 to the present, I have changed, in a piecemeal fashion, from Erika Dawn Bohannon to Devon Erika Price, PhD. So I have a lot to say about picking a name, adopting a name, sharing a new name with others. And in order to make sense of my most recent change, I’d like to explore the process and consequence of each change, layer by layer, starting at the beginning.
Price née Bohannon
My dad was a bad person. Or was my dad a distressed person? An abusive person? A person the world failed? Doesn’t matter. The damage was done no matter the reason.
If you’ve been following my writing for any amount of time, you know that I have daddy-baggage, and not the stereotypical kind. Greg Bohannon was inappropriate with me. He asked me to carry more of his emotional and psychosexual weight than a grown man ought ever to ask of a friend, let alone his child. And when I refused to be used in that particular way any longer, he disowned me in one single, frothing-at-the-mouth resentful voicemail.
And so I disowned him back.
I had never liked my last name, Bohannon. Kids mispronounced it, the way kids do. Sometimes I’d get an askance question about what kind of name it was. I don’t want to overstate things. I’m a white person in the United States, born with a last name that is probably Irish. Other than a great-grandpa who was not white passing, every family member I have ever met is white, with all the privileges attendant. A few people mispronouncing my name, or implying that it was a name for hillbillies, is not some major hardship.
It did get under my adolescent skin, though. I was affected by the classism and prejudice that decided my name was less respectable than others. My family never had a good answer for what kind of people they were. I envied kids with names that sounded, to my ear, more professional or high-class. So when my dad gave me the excuse to change it, I ran headlong into the surname of my mother’s family, Price. It was an English name. It evoked money. It was fancier.
Changing my name was easy. I filed the paperwork at the Cleveland courthouse the second I turned 18. A request, a copy of my birth certificate with a form stapled to it, a line in a legal publication in case I was trying to change my name to escape debt. All told it cost $110. A month or so later, my ID and social security card and college records were all changed. Nobody who met me as an adult knew me as anything but Price.
PhD
I knew before I went away to college that I wanted to get a doctorate. I was fascinated with psychology, and read books and manuals about psychopathology and groupthink and conformity all the time. I also romanticized the academy. In a place where intelligence and rigor were valued, I fantasized I could fit in. Professors could keep their own schedules, and answered to no one. They studied subjects that mattered to them, and did not serve somebody else’s interests. I could wear, think, do, carry on however I wanted.
None of that is really true, but I didn’t know that for several more years. Until I achieved my dream and immediately became disillusioned with it, I toiled tirelessly to get into graduate school and complete a dissertation.
There was another reason that I hungered for a doctorate, beyond the desire for academic intellectual freedom and a life of the mind. I also liked how Dr. Price sounded. From the time I hit puberty, I’d been called ma’am or miss or Ms., and it never felt right, and I didn’t know why. I knew, however, that Dr. was gender-neutral. I wanted that neutrality for myself. I wanted to be defined by my accomplishments, rather than my sex.
It also sounded respectable, and elite, like my new last name. I am not going to let myself off the hook for that. If you are excited to get a PhD, and to be called Doctor, you can’t really say there isn’t some element of elitism embedded in it. In my mind, I was rewriting who I was, letting my intellect and seriousness come to the fore, and casting aside the backstory that didn’t feel like it fit.
Erika Bohannon was a girl, one born from hill people who were maligned and overworked for generations in warehouses and mines. Dr. Price was a gender-neutral intellectual, fancy, and presentable. People would respect Dr. Price.
And they did. They really fucking did. A whole world of status and privilege opened up to me the second I got those dignified, university-endorsed letters near my name. Consulting jobs were much easier to come by. Speaking engagements were more plentiful. Students and academic peers did not challenge me. People would back down from disagreeing with me before an argument even began.
I had always been described as intimidating. A PhD made me almost unassailable, in some people’s minds. I didn’t realize this until a friend chewed me out for how authoritatively I always spoke, how my certainty cowed people. These days, I have to be aware of the power my name and my degree allow me to wield. Even when I don’t broadcast it, it is in the social air.
I still like being called Dr. Price, even though the name is a tool that can be easily misused, or over-interpreted as proof of an expertise that I don’t have. I earned my degrees, through hard work and canniness, but I also did not earn them, because I had no say in the fact that I was born smart.
I am a whole, unified being, and each incarnation of me is influenced by the experiences of the last.
I don’t come from an elite, highly educated family, but I was able to slide into that community by virtue of my whiteness and my ability to imitate wealthy, academic social mores. Like my hillbilly forebears who married white and moved north, I reinvented myself as someone with more privilege than I actually had. Because I looked enough the part, I easily got that privilege for myself. And both my title and surname changes helped to facilitate that.
Devon née Erika
There are a few narrative threads that, when woven together, explain all my name changes. Classism. Family trauma. Gender dysphoria. My final name change, my most recent one, is most obviously connected to the gender piece. But I am a whole, unified being, and each incarnation of me is influenced by the experiences of the last, so I can’t say that my family history and identity within my family didn’t have a role in this change either.
Erika is a perfectly good name. I like the spiky angularity of it. I like how closely it resembles the male name from which it is derived. For many years, it fit me, as a prickly woman-ish being that was forever revealing male sharpness and assuredness. I was a square-jawed, thick-eyebrowed face hidden behind a curtain of long hair. I was a male name with a feminine vowel tacked on at the end of it, as almost an afterthought. It suited who I was.
But at some point that began to change. My presentation and appearance became steadily more affirming until my name got to be the only thing that was incongruent. My sister saw it coming. She asked if I wanted to be read as neither female nor male by strangers. I said yes, I wanted to be as androgynous as I could be. She stared through her windshield and said well, but my name would always give it away.
It did until it didn’t. I had already picked out my new name by then, though I hadn’t begun the process of changing it legally.
I’d always been enamored with gender-neutral names. When I first started writing, as a daydreamy preteen, I populated my stories with girls named things like Danny or Ryan or Joey. This remained a motif in my writing as an adult. I loved women with men’s names, like Evan Rachel Wood. I tracked how some names’ gendered associations evolved over the decades — like Ashley or Kelly — beginning as male, then slowly becoming unacceptable for boys, as they came to be used for girls more and more.
The trend never seemed to go in the opposite direction. A girl could be given a boy’s name, and it would make her seem scrappy, tough, or unique. But once a boy’s name was applied to more than a handful of girls, it became tainted, somehow, and could never be applied to boys again. And girl’s names were never directed back at boys.
There is a name that has not followed this strong statistical trend. It’s Devon. Its usage has remained truly gender-neutral over the decades. In some time periods there are more girls named Devon, in others there are more boys. Boys have predominated for the past few decades. I’ve looked over the statistics many times, to reassure myself that by the time I am old, my name will still be seen as neutral. I hope that I am right.
Why did I pick this name? It has the same number of letters as my old name. It begins with the letter my old middle name, Dawn, did. And I have always liked it.
The first Devon I ever knew was the second cello in my high school orchestra. She was elegant and very quiet. Talented, but not showy like the first chair. I knew by then that Devon was mostly a boy’s name, so when I saw it applied to a girl, I was enchanted. She was dedicated, and kept to herself, not unpopular but also never caught up in drama. She wore maroon and burgundy a lot, and she was absolutely a burgundy type of person. Refined, deep, classy.
I befriended another Devon in college. He was a guy. We got along really well; he was witty and well-read, and his humor could be a little cruel once he had a few drinks in him. When we got together, we could really hurt a person’s feelings, and do it in an astute way that we thought was charming. I was a condescending, funny sometimes-asshole, like a lot of young adults are, and we vibed for a couple years, then lost touch.
I haven’t known many Devons in my life, other than those two, and I’ve never been super close with a Devon. That seemed necessary for me. I didn’t want anyone to think I was stealing their identity with my name change. I didn’t want to pick a name that was either too common, or so rare as to raise eyebrows. I wanted a name that was truly neutral, and could be read as female or male. At the same time, I wanted it to skew ever-so-slightly male. I wanted it to be something that looked good beside my last name, Price. Devon Price was the natural fit, and one that felt right very quickly after selecting it.
I love how it looks and sounds. I love that when people hear it, it helps my identity slide into focus for them. Sometimes you have to search for a name for a while, but when you know, you know.
Changing my name was more expensive this time, and more laborious. Chicago’s process in 2018 is way more of a pain than Ohio’s was in 2006. I went to court, I filed the paperwork, I spoke with a judge, I published my new name in a legal journal, I waited well over a month, I got hassled by an Illinois DMV employee who didn’t understand why some of my documents were in black and white rather than color. I got copies of the signed, stamped form. All told it cost me more like $600*.
Because I still felt a lot of shame about being transgender, I didn’t tell everyone about the name change right away. There are people I’m still afraid to tell. Unlike with my other name changes, I am often hesitant to broadcast this one. I am still deeply terrified of being seen as attention-seeking, deluded, or self-obsessed.
And honestly, I have changed my name three times at this point. A person could be forgiven for seeing me as attention-seeking, image conscious, self-obsessed. Lots of people my age are getting married, having children, thinking exclusively about matters outside of themselves and their identity. I have always been quite inwardly focused, fixated on understanding and improving myself, and to many people, that can be distasteful, childish.
I’m not interested in hand-waving away the theatricality of my decisions. I changed my name legally, twice, and pursued a PhD, and some of my motives for doing those things were image-conscious. I absorbed negative messages about my family name, my background, and the gender I was assigned at birth. I felt uncomfortable in the identity I was placed into, and some of the reasons for that discomfort are more reasonable or pure than others.
Still, each change was deeply symbolic and important to me, and each went through years of practical contemplation before I went through with them. I wanted to change my last name for two years before I did it. I worked toward a PhD for about eight years, counting undergrad. I tried out my new first name for a year before I legally adopted it, and I tried out other names for a year before that. My name changes were never an impulsive fleeing from the person I once was.
I will never stand perfectly illuminated in the light of self-knowledge. But I can feel the heat of the bulb.
But at the same time, it’s also not the case that each name change has been all about unearthing a more bare, true version of me. Names are lapidary things as much as they are a form of communication. My true self, to the extent that a human has a true self, is not contained in any of the words that a person uses for me.
Authenticity is a paradox — we are forever changing, and sometimes we surprise even ourselves, so there is no singular true “us” that we can ever fully embody. But at the same time, we can feel inauthenticity very intensely. We will never perfectly express the whole of who we are, no matter what we do. But with our choices, we can come closer to who we are, or move farther away, and we can feel the impact of those choices on how comfortable we feel in our own skin. I will never stand perfectly illuminated in the light of self-knowledge. But I can feel the heat of the bulb.
I have joked with some of my oldest friends that in another 10 years, I will change my whole name again to something utterly ridiculous. It’s a self-deprecating, defensive joke, designed to protect me from the perception that I am, already, being ridiculous. Trans people are perceived as self-absorbed and deserving of ridicule quite a lot. People would prefer it if we’d hide our feelings of wrongness and discomfort, to smooth over all the rumples in the gendered and world that’s been imposed on all of us.
I’d love to be smooth. Respectable. Presentable. Easy to deal with. Refined. Many of my name changes had those goals in mind. But at some point, I learned that to be myself, I had to fight and inconvenience people and file a lot of paperwork. My first name change was a major battleground, a significant reclaiming of identity. I made sure I would no longer be identified by the surname of the man who mistreated me. It turns out, that first change, that first assertion of self, was just practice for the decade of self-finding and self-defining that was destined to follow. And while I wish I had been born into a world that didn’t require so much hassle from me, I’m glad that, living in this world, I embraced being a hassle.
*Name changes and gender marker changes in Illinois are very expensive. Thankfully, for those trans people who cannot afford it, there is the Transformative Justice Law Project. The TJLP helps low-income trans people file for waivers of their court fees. If you are trans and your income is 125% of the poverty line or less, you can work with the TJLP to get a waiver and your name change will be free.
Additionally, the TJLP offers free monthly clinics during which legal aides and volunteers assist trans people in filing their name and gender marker change paperwork, and provide them with moral support as they face a judge during their name change hearing. I took advantage of this support, and it was immensely helpful. If you live in Chicago, spread the word. If you have the means, consider donating to the TJLP.