I'm Facebook official!

My existence is now 100% certified official on Facebook. Last week I finally changed my name and pronouns on there. And gosh does it ever feel good to be able to check Facebook and not have to see my old name all over everything. Yeah!

It was sort of on a whim, to be honest. I hadn't really planned ahead of time when I was going to take that step, and wrote probably the one of the worst "coming out" status ever. It went like so:

Alright, so I was I planning on waiting till I was a little further along in my transition to change my name on Facebook, but it's friggin bugging me seeing my old name on here all the time, so Ashley it is. For those that don't know, I've been using that name within the trans community for about two and half years now, and in my day-to-day life for just over four months. So yeah... I'd really appreciate it if you could try to refer to me by that name instead of Tyler. Thanks! :)

Oh yeah, and PS: I'm trans, for anyone who hasn't figured that out yet.: P

Heh, pretty terrible. The thing is, I wasn't even thinking of it as a coming out. I had long since largely stopped caring about the distinction between out and not on Facebook. And by this point I felt like everyone to whom I actually "owed" a proper coming out had already gotten one. (And perhaps I was mildly resentful of the fact that I'd felt like I owed that to anyone in the first place.) So I saw this less as letting people know that I'm trans and more as just explaining why my profile suddenly had a different name. And, you know, so that the next time I came up on someone's feed they wouldn't be like: who the heck is Ashley??

Of course I got lots of "likes" and supportive comments. My paternal grandmother left a comment saying "whether you are Tyler or Ashley, trans or otherwise you are our grandchild and we love you." Awww. ♥

I also got a bunch of questions in my inbox. Most of them were good or at least reasonable. For example, one of my aunts asked me if I had any advice on how she should explain it to her children, or if there was anything specifically that I wanted her to say or to not say, which is like the best freaking question ever seriously I wish everybody asked questions like that. I also got one kind of weird question from someone who was wondering if I was still a Christian and if so, how I reconciled my "transgender existence" (his actual words) with the bible. (If you're new to this blog, I have a dark mysterious past as a conservative Christian, but left the faith several years ago and now identify as a non-theist or atheist.) So I told him that I wasn't a believer anymore, but also pointed out that the bible doesn't really talk much about trans stuff anyways. He also asked what it was like growing up trans in the church and I gave kind of long-winded reply about how it actually totally sucked and how much better it could have been if I'd been raised in a church that was queer\trans-affirming.

Of course I'd been intending to eventually change my name for some time, but what finally pushed me over the edge and got me to do it was, of all things, wanting to add a new friend who's only ever known me as Ashley. Remember my previous post when I said I might have a date with a girl I met on the internets? Well, she and I still haven't gotten a chance to hang out yet for various reasons— she had family visiting, I was busy, she was sick— but we've been texting for a while now. I went and found her on Facebook, but felt super weird about sending a friend request from my old name. Hence my new-found motivation. (Afterwards she was like "aww you could've just added me before, I wouldn't have cared...")

Anyways, we're planning on getting together this weekend, so hopefully that works out. Oh, and I should mention that, of all the bizarre things, we discovered that we have the same birthday— how weird is that?! So now we're already planning on having a joint birthday party, even though it's not till February. :D

It seems I'm going about transition in totally the "wrong" order, at least according to the traditional trans narrative. I'm now fully out (except at work) and I haven't even started HRT yet. Sometimes I can't help but feel that people are going to expect me to start looking "more female" soon, when in reality that's probably still a fair ways off. But whatever. Obviously there's no right or wrong way to be trans— doing it this way works for me, and that's good enough. :)