My name is Seranine Elisabeth Elliot, which you would already know if you had seen the video I posted recently. As a trans woman, I had more cause than most to legally change my name, so I thought I’d write about where each part came from.
As a child, an infant, our parents give us a name. Sometimes, that’s all they give us. My family name was McKendry, a name that my brother and his family, and my children (as far as I know) still have. I don’t have a problem with the name aesthetically or anything, but given my relationship with my parents (i.e., there isn’t one), along with the sense that my name, along with my literal identity, had been effectively stolen by the mother of my children, I was not keen on keeping it. My other two names were Edward and Jason, and I was never fond of either.
Seranine (/sɛrəna͡ɪn/) is an unusual name. I thought I had invented it, but after I had it legally changed, I noticed that some rare few women around the world also go by the same. I’m not sure whether they pronounce it the way I do, and I don’t know that I’ll ever find out. Its origins lie in a story I have been ever-so-slowly developing for a little over a decade. The heroine is Sera Nine, and in some iterations, the first part of her name is an acronym. Her world is a mildly dystopian future, and she’s a cyborg. After much rumination, I realized that a lot of what that world was about, and what her place in it represented, was a metaphor for my then-undiagnosed dysphoria. One of her primary internal struggles is one to determine whether she is even really human.
As for Elisabeth, that has long been one of my favorite girl’s names. It appeals to the engineer in me, because it is supremely flexible. You can go by Elise, Lisa, Beth, Betty, Lisbeth, Libby, and so on, and still get away with saying “short for ‘Elisabeth’” if you really need to. I don’t really feel like an Elisabeth, per se, but I do like the parallel that a name with many derivatives holds with a life that now feels as though it can go almost any direction I like.
Elliot was initially chosen for two main reasons — one, after the character from Scrubs, a character I always liked, and who faced some occasional confusion over her gender because of her name; and two, because upon researching the meanings of various surnames, I discovered that one possible interpretation of “Elliot” was “noble struggle.” I thought, what more noble struggle is there than the struggle to know oneself? Not long after I was mostly settled on using it for my new surname, a close friend of mine let me know about her son, Elliott (named for Elliott Smith, the musician), who they believe has gender dysphoria. I found this to be a happy coincidence, and am glad that she has figured it out early, and also has a supportive family who wants the best for her.
