If you've taken a moment to have a look at my publication history, you'll notice that my writing to date has been published under the name Ashley Ford-McAllister (as was my previous blog, that I lost the login details for...)
So - why the move to Ash Ford-McAllister? It's a very small change on paper (which it technically isn't - Ashley is still my legal first name) but a huge change on a personal level, and one which reflects a lot.
Ash was a name that, at 9yrs old, and with an absolute certainty that the answer to the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a man", and a belief that the "change" people kept warning me about would be when I'd get the same genitals as my Dad had (yes, a female puberty came as a hell of a shock. Such a severe and upsetting one, in fact, that I just assumed what was probably severe endometriosis was "just normal girl stuff" - PSA: if you're bleeding for 6+ days, and what's coming out is literal clumps of dark red blood, if the pain is so severe you can barely walk, you're only halfway comfortable if you're literally fully submerged in a scalding hot bath, and you're missing days of work/school - that's not "just what women deal with." In general, people who bleed during their menses are able to do so whilst getting on with their ordinary life) - I found lurking in the middle of my deadname, and demanded that everyone - peers, family, teachers - called me by.
I was Ash Ford for the next 9 years, apart from when I needed to show ID to get jobs, when I had to present my original birth certificate, and became deadname to HR departments, and 'Ash' to colleagues.
When I realised I could legally change my name, I decided that choosing 'Ashley Ford' made it a little easier for people - Ash Ford often confused people, as, obviously, 'Ashford' is also a name in its own right. I also had some weird idea that 'Ash' was a 'nickname', and therefore 'not professional' - and, coming from a family I only realised were in working poverty as an adult living away from that family, and having no generational wealth, inheritance hopes, or wealthy 'friends of the family' to turn to, being able to get decently-paid, long-term work was a priority, and something I needed to avoid giving employers any reason to prevent me achieving.
I was 'Ashley Ford' for the next 11yrs.
Then I met my wife, Morgana McAllister.
I knew within months that I wanted to marry her, and, equally, that I didn't want to do the patriarchal "you take my last name, right?", nor did I want to lose my father's name - I was, and, even in the wake of his passing, still am, close to him. He taught me how to be a man by his own gentle, intelligent, respectful, considerate example. He was a quiet, open-minded man, a man with nothing to prove, and who explained that "different but equal" was a vibrant and beautiful concept - that women deserved the same respect men got without question without any expectation that they "approach masculinity" in any way. That people who weren't white had the same frustrations, resentments, ambitions, and passions as were accommodated and accepted when they were held by white people. That gay people had brought much more to the world than they were openly credited with. My Dad told me about lesbian women he knew, and women who chose not to pursue marriage and/or parenthood for reasons of their own, which had nothing to do with sexualities.
My Dad was the living proof, and is now the 'returned to the Collective Unconscious' proof, that people don't "become trans" because they're not introduced to different ways of being the sex on their birth certificate. My Dad brought in gender non-conforming women, women who had de-centred compulsory cisheteronormativity (the attitude that holds that agreeing that your gender is accurately reflected on your original birth certificate, and being 'vanilla heterosexual', is the only acceptable way to identify and live) as everyday, complex, fully formed, interesting characters. I met a wide range of women, who approached womanhood in some very diverse ways, throughout my childhood and adolescence.
I knew women could have short hair, wear masculine clothing, that they didn't have to marry or have children, that they could form relationships with other women (at that time, marriage between same-sex partners was very much not legal...I grew up going through the row about repealing Section 28...that was fun...). I knew women could reject the concept of "being ladylike" absolutely. I also knew that none of that mattered, because the idea of "being a woman" felt fundamentally wrong. There's so much hostility to trans people talking about who and how we are that almost any attempt to explain this 'wrongness' gets shouted down by people who are fixated on trans people not being legitimate, on transness being some kind of fraud or deception. But if someone were to tell me I was "a person of colour", that sense of wrongness, the absolute certainty that something which did not belong to me was being assigned to me, is the same sensation I get when I try to talk about even a past in which I was "a girl." That - the statement "I was a girl" - feels like the lie, the fraud, the deception. I never connected with any form of girlhood - and my female best friend, and two schoolmates, were absolute tomboys. I saw girls who wore boys' clothes, and played boys' games. I knew women who worked outside the home (unusual at that time for married women, in my rural community), women who rode motorbikes, and women who were better at fixing fences and roofs than their husbands. But it was still a lie that I was, or could be, a woman.
So - why the move to Ash Ford-McAllister? It's a very small change on paper (which it technically isn't - Ashley is still my legal first name) but a huge change on a personal level, and one which reflects a lot.
Ash was a name that, at 9yrs old, and with an absolute certainty that the answer to the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a man", and a belief that the "change" people kept warning me about would be when I'd get the same genitals as my Dad had (yes, a female puberty came as a hell of a shock. Such a severe and upsetting one, in fact, that I just assumed what was probably severe endometriosis was "just normal girl stuff" - PSA: if you're bleeding for 6+ days, and what's coming out is literal clumps of dark red blood, if the pain is so severe you can barely walk, you're only halfway comfortable if you're literally fully submerged in a scalding hot bath, and you're missing days of work/school - that's not "just what women deal with." In general, people who bleed during their menses are able to do so whilst getting on with their ordinary life) - I found lurking in the middle of my deadname, and demanded that everyone - peers, family, teachers - called me by.
I was Ash Ford for the next 9 years, apart from when I needed to show ID to get jobs, when I had to present my original birth certificate, and became deadname to HR departments, and 'Ash' to colleagues.
When I realised I could legally change my name, I decided that choosing 'Ashley Ford' made it a little easier for people - Ash Ford often confused people, as, obviously, 'Ashford' is also a name in its own right. I also had some weird idea that 'Ash' was a 'nickname', and therefore 'not professional' - and, coming from a family I only realised were in working poverty as an adult living away from that family, and having no generational wealth, inheritance hopes, or wealthy 'friends of the family' to turn to, being able to get decently-paid, long-term work was a priority, and something I needed to avoid giving employers any reason to prevent me achieving.
I was 'Ashley Ford' for the next 11yrs.
Then I met my wife, Morgana McAllister.
I knew within months that I wanted to marry her, and, equally, that I didn't want to do the patriarchal "you take my last name, right?", nor did I want to lose my father's name - I was, and, even in the wake of his passing, still am, close to him. He taught me how to be a man by his own gentle, intelligent, respectful, considerate example. He was a quiet, open-minded man, a man with nothing to prove, and who explained that "different but equal" was a vibrant and beautiful concept - that women deserved the same respect men got without question without any expectation that they "approach masculinity" in any way. That people who weren't white had the same frustrations, resentments, ambitions, and passions as were accommodated and accepted when they were held by white people. That gay people had brought much more to the world than they were openly credited with. My Dad told me about lesbian women he knew, and women who chose not to pursue marriage and/or parenthood for reasons of their own, which had nothing to do with sexualities.
My Dad was the living proof, and is now the 'returned to the Collective Unconscious' proof, that people don't "become trans" because they're not introduced to different ways of being the sex on their birth certificate. My Dad brought in gender non-conforming women, women who had de-centred compulsory cisheteronormativity (the attitude that holds that agreeing that your gender is accurately reflected on your original birth certificate, and being 'vanilla heterosexual', is the only acceptable way to identify and live) as everyday, complex, fully formed, interesting characters. I met a wide range of women, who approached womanhood in some very diverse ways, throughout my childhood and adolescence.
I knew women could have short hair, wear masculine clothing, that they didn't have to marry or have children, that they could form relationships with other women (at that time, marriage between same-sex partners was very much not legal...I grew up going through the row about repealing Section 28...that was fun...). I knew women could reject the concept of "being ladylike" absolutely. I also knew that none of that mattered, because the idea of "being a woman" felt fundamentally wrong. There's so much hostility to trans people talking about who and how we are that almost any attempt to explain this 'wrongness' gets shouted down by people who are fixated on trans people not being legitimate, on transness being some kind of fraud or deception. But if someone were to tell me I was "a person of colour", that sense of wrongness, the absolute certainty that something which did not belong to me was being assigned to me, is the same sensation I get when I try to talk about even a past in which I was "a girl." That - the statement "I was a girl" - feels like the lie, the fraud, the deception. I never connected with any form of girlhood - and my female best friend, and two schoolmates, were absolute tomboys. I saw girls who wore boys' clothes, and played boys' games. I knew women who worked outside the home (unusual at that time for married women, in my rural community), women who rode motorbikes, and women who were better at fixing fences and roofs than their husbands. But it was still a lie that I was, or could be, a woman.
Sorry - that was a bit of a tangent. Back to Morgana, myself, and how we identified our partnership to the world.
We toyed with "Ashmor", a combining of our first names, as a surname. But "Ashley Ashmor" is a bit of a mouthful. We considered just each keeping our own surnames, but neither of us felt comfortable with that - we didn't just want to be married, we wanted the world to know we were married.
So, it came down to whether we would be the McAllister-Fords or the Ford-McAllisters...and we both decided that the latter sounded better.
So, at age 29, I became Ashley Ford-McAllister - and encountered both the English snideness about the Scots (and their absolute dementedness when I rebuffed their vague racism with the reality that I'm actually half Irish...which the English hate even more than they hate the Scots, when it doesn't present with bouncing red ringlets and porcelain skin...), and the unbridled joy and desire to engage of people who actually were Scottish when they heard the last half of my new name.
I was Ashley Ford-McAllister for another nine years.
And then I lost a job I genuinely believed would be a career, in a way which managed to combine ableism and transphobia on HR's part. Along with the job, I lost what was becoming a friendship, and, because of the situation with my sight loss, and being at that awkward age no one considers a "protected characteristic", or worth championing, any realistic chance of ever being employed again.
The world of PAYE employment had rejected me, quite aggressively. So I rejected it - and reclaimed a name I had laid down almost 20yrs before.
Ashley became Ash - and I began to feel a lot more comfortable talking about being trans, and about being disabled.
Never let anyone tell you names don't matter.
If you feel your name doesn't quite work for you - change it. Whether you're trans, non-binary, or cis. Try out some possibilities. Read about meanings from your culture and/or heritage. Ask your parents about other names they had planned for you. (I did the trans masc thing of "ask your parents what they would have named you if you had been born a boy" - Griffin, apparently, if my Dad had had his way.)
And a final comment on names - my "p*rnstar name" would have been Griffin Rockell (no, scammers - neither of those are password answers...too bad...)... I suppose 'Griff Rock' could work :)
What about you? What names have held power in your life?
I was Ashley Ford-McAllister for another nine years.
And then I lost a job I genuinely believed would be a career, in a way which managed to combine ableism and transphobia on HR's part. Along with the job, I lost what was becoming a friendship, and, because of the situation with my sight loss, and being at that awkward age no one considers a "protected characteristic", or worth championing, any realistic chance of ever being employed again.
The world of PAYE employment had rejected me, quite aggressively. So I rejected it - and reclaimed a name I had laid down almost 20yrs before.
Ashley became Ash - and I began to feel a lot more comfortable talking about being trans, and about being disabled.
Never let anyone tell you names don't matter.
If you feel your name doesn't quite work for you - change it. Whether you're trans, non-binary, or cis. Try out some possibilities. Read about meanings from your culture and/or heritage. Ask your parents about other names they had planned for you. (I did the trans masc thing of "ask your parents what they would have named you if you had been born a boy" - Griffin, apparently, if my Dad had had his way.)
And a final comment on names - my "p*rnstar name" would have been Griffin Rockell (no, scammers - neither of those are password answers...too bad...)... I suppose 'Griff Rock' could work :)
What about you? What names have held power in your life?
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