i downloaded mine from a silly pink hedgie :3

About 13 years ago when I was 13 (6 years before my egg was forcibly destroyed), I made a Mii after a Castlevania character on my 3DS and a bit later at that time I was grinding Smash Bros 3DS a ton online.

Iirc, for some reason your username online shows as whatever your Mii’s name is, and being known as Shanoa just felt so right to me. So after a lot of hesitation, I decided to name my online handles that and even entered my first in-person Smash tournaments that year under the same name. 💀 I have been competing in platform fighters ever since.

Being known by most of my friends as Shanoa made it really stick with me like it was my real name and whenever I thought about living as a girl, that was the name I always wanted to go by. So after I learned I was trans, I ended up going through with it.

I’m still very early in my social transition, but it’s pretty cool to think despite that most people I know irl have been calling me exclusively by my real name for the majority of my life now lol

I used a random name generator and kept some of the ones I liked on a list! I wanted something that sounded like a name, but wasn’t something you hear a lot, so I chanhed a letter and I loved it!

Then I googled it for a final check and realized it was a character in pokemon, and loved it more!

name of design language & name of school of thought

My first name (Sophie) was picked by strenuously looking through the top 1,000 girl names in the US, and writing down anything that felt “right”. I ended up with a short list (including Amber, Luna, Aurora, Bri, and a few others I can’t remember), and I looked up the meaning and histories of each. Sophie is the French form of the Greek Sophia, which means knowledge and wisdom. Given that I’m highly autistic and have a whole damn encyclopedia of facts in my head, I felt it fit the best (and it’s super cute). I was going to go with Sophia and just have Sophie as a nickname, but I liked Sophie so much that I just had to have it as my legal name. I also picked my middle and last names, though. My middle name (which I won’t say as to not doxx myself) is related to my favorite wildflower, in a language of the country I wish I could immigrate to. I spent a very long time on it. My last name is a common US last name that is also from the region of that country, and I picked it mostly so I didn’t have an immediately searchable name (harder to doxx/stalk me). The reason I picked a new last name was because…well, let’s just say I had a horrible childhood, and want nothing to do with my family. I didn’t want my name to feel like it was “owned” by them. Which is also why I didn’t ask them what they would have named me if they knew I was a girl, as others here have done.

Got drunk with friends and wrote down all the names that might work, and tried then one by one. Good thing the first one stuck, cause the next one was womannator 3000

I made a spreadsheet, of a bunch of random nouns I thought had name potential, and then asked my partner and friends their opinions and documented the results

Stole it from my second grade teacher.

Born with a unisex name, so my parents 🤷

I was thinking about Satan back then and noticed that Lucifer can be shortened to Lucy and thought that this name is actually really nice.

TLDR the reason is satanism

I saw it online in the profile of a human rights activist and liked the sound of it. I even used it as an alt username and character names years before coming out, so when the time came to choose a new name for myself, I knew it was the only name I could accept, and I loved it from the moment I started using it :)

I struggled for months or even years with this. Then I named a pen and paper character after June from avatar and got so used to be called June when playing, that I started to like it.

Took the equivalent popular name from the year of my birth. As in second most popular boy name to second most popular girl name.

It felt correct immediately, but YMMV

One day while smoking with a friend someone placed a rock in my hand and It struck me like a vision.

I’d tried out a few names at that point and none of them felt like me, then the name I chose just popped into my head and i just kinda knew immediately in that moment. Told my friends later that day and 7 years later it feels weird to think my name was ever anything else.

So when I told my mum about me I wanted it to be a little of an ice-breaker for her to brainstorm a new one with me. I had some ‘soft’ requirements - appropriate for my age, something I could shorten and greek-ish (deadname and my sister’s names both are, not like we have any familial link or anything). I’m the eldest of 2 and for years we have known her name had she been a boy but for some reason we both thought my other name was what she got called. Turns out it wasnt true and my mum said “oh no you were going to be called x”. And when I heard it I realised it fulfilled all my requirements, kinda suited me and it just felt nice, like it was mine to reclaim.

(Btw, username unrelated lol)