What’s in a Name? Choosing Grace…Again
I LOVE A GOOD DROP-DOWN MENU
There’s a part of my brain that desperately wants life to come with a user manual. I like directions. I like templates. I like a good, solid box that tells me where the edges are so I can do things “correctly.” And I know I’m not alone—our whole species struggles with ambiguity. We like simple answers. Clean categories. Drop-down menus with one right choice.
But life isn’t drop-down menus. It’s fill-in-the-blanks we’re scared to get wrong.
AND THEN…I CAME OUT AS TRANS
At 26, I came out as transgender. For years, I’d been squeezing myself into a box that didn’t fit, because that’s what I knew how to do. I didn’t understand what it felt like to actually feel right in your gender—just that being a trans man felt… closer? And even “closer” felt like a luxury in the chaos of everything else happening in my life.
Let me tell you: when your gender identity is going through an existential rebrand, you’re newly married with a baby on the way, and you’re starting out a fresh career, you want everything else to be easy. You want to be understood because you’re doing the emotional equivalent of juggling flaming swords—blindfolded—while sleep-deprived. You just don’t have the energy to explain yourself on top of all that.
Not a woman? Fine. Trans Man it is.
They/Them is “too hard”? Cool. Just He/Him me into next week.
I won’t even get into all the ways I tried to perform ‘man’—the list is long, and honestly, a little embarrassing. Let’s just say, I tried to solve emotional discomfort with American Eagle polos and body spray. It didn’t work.
And then came the name.
THE NAME DILEMMA
“Grayson” seemed like the obvious move. It’s masculine, it’s adjacent to Grace—it fits the algorithm. But the truth was, I never disliked my name. Grace always felt like me. To me, it felt neutral. Familiar. Rooted. But as I began presenting more masculinely, it started to feel like a risk. People read Grace a certain way, and suddenly it felt like my name might out me in spaces where safety wasn’t guaranteed.
So I went with Grayson. It felt like the right choice for that moment—a layer of protection in a country where trans people are legislated against, misrepresented, and harmed. I needed control over who knew what about me while I tried to figure it all out. A more conventionally masculine name helped.
But, it never felt like mine.
Every time someone said it out loud, there was a tiny beat of disconnect. Like being called someone else’s name at Starbucks and just… going with it. Meanwhile, my inner monologue was still fully “Grace”-coded. And that name held weight. It carried my history, my memories, my coming-of-age as someone perceived as a girl, then a woman. I don’t have shame about that person—I was that person. And I still am that person, shaped by all those experiences.
Taking testosterone changed things—my voice, my face, my skin, the way I move through the world—but it didn’t erase what came before. If anything, it made my soul feel more settled and gave me a deeper appreciation for the messy timeline that got me here. Grace, for all its gendered baggage, felt like a name that could hold that complexity.
Grayson never quite clicked. And honestly? Sometimes Grace doesn’t either. But it feels more mine than anything else I’ve tried. And that, for now, is enough.
HELLO…AGAIN.
So here I am—asking people in my life to meet me (again) in this in-between space. To be okay with a version of me that doesn’t fit neatly into a box. I put this off for a long time because, honestly, the thought of another update made me cringe. (Shout out to my therapist who keeps reminding me it’s okay to take up space.)
I’m learning to trust myself. To move through the world without needing a user manual. To offer myself the same patience and compassion I’d give anyone else still figuring it out—which, spoiler alert, is all of us.
Trans people deserve that space: to explore, to evolve, to circle back to old names or forge new ones altogether. And truly? We all deserve that kind of freedom. That kind of grace–pun intended.
Hello. My name is Grace. It always has been, and now I’m claiming it fully, on my own terms.
My name is Grace, and this is what I know:
We all deserve room to try things out.
To say, “This is me… for now.”
And to be heard. To be believed.
