Goodnight, Ramona
A beautiful guest post about a legal name change, continuity, and permanence
Hey folks! I’m still traveling, so today’s guest post is brought to you by Ramona Sullivan, creator of the Substack Whatever Row’s Your Boat! Y’all should definitely give her a follow.
I absolutely adored reading this post, and I think you will too.
Over to you, Ramona!
Friday, March 14th in most ways was mundane. I woke up, had breakfast, and went to work for what ended up being a rather long and annoying day. After, I got drinks with Clare, stayed out until a respectable-for-these-days 10:30, and went home, though only after failing to order McDonald’s because the one near my apartment had already closed for the night.
It could have been any Friday, but when I woke up I was still legally my birth name, and by the time I went to bed I was forever and henceforth Ramona.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect leading up to my name change trial. A trial. The word made it sound so intimidating. It felt inevitable that I had done something wrong and I’d have to try again, especially with all of the steps I had to follow to properly file for my name change in court. One of the biggest requirements was to send a notice of your trial to your creditors, and I ended up having to express re-ship the notice to my bank to ensure it got delivered before the trial after my first attempt got lost in the mail.
When I entered the virtual hearing room, 9:00 am sharp, there were about 30 different people logged in for various cases that seemed to all be related to name changes. Notably, most people there were cis. Not that I looked particularly closely or would necessarily even have known, but I might’ve been the only trans person having a hearing for a name change within the block.
My case was called second, and I internally let out a small sigh of relief because I had not taken time off of work. While I had cleared it with my manager that I might be slightly delayed coming in for my 11:00 am shift, I was worried I was going to be there for a while when I saw the number of other people in the room. The woman called before me, an immigrant adopting a westernized name, ended up having to request for an extension because she failed to contact a couple of her creditors she listed on her application, only adding to my own jitters.
I appreciate the irony that perhaps the last time I’ll ever have to respond to my birth name was to be sworn in so that I could be legally known as Ramona. Maybe irony is the wrong word, but there is definitely some symbolism. It’s a feeling I’ve also felt picking up my HRT from the pharmacy, like a form of dark twisted humor that forces you to acknowledge the past so that you can live authentically in the present.
Somewhere along the line of all of the unpacking of myself I’ve done in the last four years I realized that I rather strongly disliked my birth name. I hold myself back from using the word hate, I don’t think that’s true. But, the more time passes since I used that name regularly, the more it just feels foreign. Once upon a time, when I started using Row (short for Ramona), I told myself and my loved ones that it wasn’t so much the name as the connotation, but that illusion pretty quickly eroded if it ever made sense at all. Soon, I looked up and realized that I was censoring it even with people who knew it, and sometimes even when I was just thinking or talking out loud to myself.
I hate the word dysphoria. I don’t like using it to describe my experience, nor do I always think it’s the best word to describe my experience. But my birth name makes me dysphoric maybe more than anything else about me. I grapple with how I didn’t always feel alienation from it. Maybe, I think, I never fully got the connotation of that name with my gender until later on. Being trans for a long time was something I only vaguely understood at best, and I especially didn’t think it could ever apply to me. Sometimes things have a way of making more sense as you age, like my deep-seated aversion to nicknames for the first 21 years of my life, or the vegetable that took years for me to give a chance because it sounded a little too similar to my birth name. I made a fragile peace with boyhood, but I never made peace with the prospect of being a man. Primarily, this was usually chalked up with the disbelief that we would all grow up and grow old one day, but I think as I entered college, or maybe even late high school, something clicked that something would have to change before that happened.
Sometimes I feel bad about how strongly my birth name makes me want to recoil. It’s cool to get to name yourself, don’t get me wrong, but there is a part of me that feels guilty for discarding something that my parents probably thought long and hard about, and an alias that I lived with for 21 years. It feels like driving a hard wall between me and my pre-transition self, a feeling that I’m sure is hardly unique. I think about continuity and permanence a lot. There’s not much and an ever decreasing amount of things that permeate that barrier, especially post-collegiate running and post-name change. Sometimes I feel like the Ship of Theseus. If I rebuilt everything about me am I still the same person?
In just enough time to see the partial death of my former self flash before my eyes, probably no more than five minutes in front of the judge, my birth name was my legal name no longer. I held it together until I logged off, but then for the five minutes after I sobbed in euphoria like I had never cried before. Ramona Sullivan. I pinched myself standing alone in the middle of my studio apartment just to make sure that this was real before sending out updates to friends and family that everything had gone smoothly.
It’s surreal going from one of the most rawly emotional moments of your life to clocking in for work not even an hour later, but I don’t think any other way would have captured the gravity of the moment. Because there will never be another moment in my life quite like March 14th at about 9:30 am, but I didn’t start being Ramona when a judge gave me permission. Ramona is a person I’ve been becoming all my life, she’s always been there whether I knew it or not. Legal formalities be damned, I was already Ramona. Not much actually changed.
Still, it’s a cause for celebration like every milestone that came before it. My calendar is filling up with anniversaries. September 5th, May 10th, June 19th, April 14th. Each is a moment in becoming, and I’d like to think that I cherish each of them equally. In truth, if I had kept more meticulous journals, I probably could find some milestone to celebrate about my journey just about any day of the year. The thing is I bet a lot of cis people could too. Being a completely different person from your childhood isn’t a uniquely trans experience. Not even changing your first name or gender-affirming care are uniquely trans experiences. And despite that, none of us are the Ship of Theseus. We’re the ocean beneath it, always churning, always changing. You could trace the continuity of the ocean continuing to exist and pretty much having always existed, but every day, every hour, and every second the currents change, the waves ebb and flow, the reefs and the ecosystems below transform. You can never swim in the same body of water twice, and you’ll never be the same person you were the day before. Ironically, I think that gives us both continuity and permanence. I will never be the kid I was at three, but I can draw a sometimes complicated path on how that kid transformed into me. We’re both Ramona, no matter what name we go by. I take some solace in that.
So after a few drinks and plenty of contemplation, I went to bed happy and at peace, a little transformed, and a little the same. The next day, I’ll transform all over again. Goodnight Ramona, I’ll see you in the morning, in my dreams, and in every moment after.
Such a lovely reflection! That feeling of “I can’t believe it’s real” is something that resonates deeply with me when I hear my name, when I see my scars, and in other small moments where I feel truly at home with myself.
Check Ramona out for more lovely writing!
And don’t forget to stick around here for more guest posts, joy, and good queer news!
All my love,
Ben
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Reading this gave me chills. Incredibly skilled writer