It helped me a lot when a friend told me that i do not have to stick to the first name i choose and that it's ok to try things out. I also see in my friend group that a lot of people have several names and use one mostly around their family and for other "public" stuff and then have a "friend name" that we use amongst each other, and usually both of these are official names that are on our legal documents and all.

It's not only ok to experiment, it's a necessary part of transitioning.

been there comrade. at my first local trans meetup, i dressed masc and introduced myself with my deadname. i wanted to die, it was really hard to show up so inauthentically to a crowd of authentic people

my strategy was a list, made a list and wrote a bit about why i did or didn’t feel attracted to certain names. idk if you’re american but i also used the social security baby names list from the year i was born to check vibes https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/

Took me literally years and multiple names.

But yeah it took me years, I went thru like 4 names (and many many more online) before I found my name. And it is mine. It is mine and only mine (though other people can of course have it as their name, just the meaning it has for me is mine). I love it and it is a symbol of me and that symbol is accurate and clear and correct and beautiful.

Mine is just a long standing favorite. A name I had stuck in my head for years and years. We'll see where it goes. I have a nickname I like too. Might look to explore more names too, I do still need a middle name.

I went through multiple names before I chose mine. I started with a unisex name when I was an insecure baby trans, but the name didn't really fit me or my personality. Went through a couple names that were feminine and less commonly used for like a month until I finally settled on my name after looking at a list of top baby names for my birth year and picked the one that stuck out most. I thought I picked it from just vibes, but it came to me some time after that there were similarities to my deadname; same number of syllables, same ending sound, a near-rhyme middle sound. I gave myself a new last name and together with my first I went from x letters in first (nick)name, y letters in last name to y letters in first name, x letters in last name. My brain was cooking without my own awareness. It was def from the experimentation process and giving myself the time to churn through the possibilities.

I picked a name that I could fit letters from my deadname into, because I wanted to memorialize that part of my life while still leaving it behind. That's not for everyone, some people want to just leave that shit behind and forget about it, but I like it.

Probably helps that I had long since shorted my deadname to be something gender neutral when I was still eggy and had no idea why I was doing that.

i went with a femme leaning gender neutral name that shares the first few letters of my government name
means i can keep the shortening that i like

I thought for a bit about a name that would be meaningful to me, and pretty quickly landed on a certain very girly anime that I fell in love with when I was an egg and deeply suppressing everything. I thought it would be weird and probably cringe for me to have a Japanese name but there was one character in the show… So I tried the name out and loved it and ever since.

I really liked my new name, I looked through a bunch and their meanings and I picked the one I resonated with most! After I picked it, years after, my mom said it was the name she wouldve given me if Id been AFAB so that was nice kismet

My name I'm trying out is exceedingly common for my demographic and has a hilarious meaning given the kind of person I am