I didn’t want to keep my old name, and I didn’t like its feminine version for me (if it is your name that is awesome, I just needed a cleaner break). So I needed to find something different.
My mother didn’t have any suggestions for what I would have been called if I’d been AFAB. The names that were most popular - or of equivalent popularity to my old name - in the year or decade I was born didn’t feel right for me (see above comment if they are your name). And I didn’t want a namespace collision with any friends or partners-of-friends. So I couldn’t be Sarah.
Having been forcibly ejected from my previous sense of self I was desperate to reclaim some sort of meaning and connection to a name for my actual self. Names that alluded to animals or qualities I liked sounded like I was trying to self-insert into The Ring Cycle or I had quaffed deeply from the inkhorn.
I tried finding names that had suffix collisions of various lengths within and across various cryptographic hash algorithms with my old name but to no avail. Then I realised that I should probably keep my first initial to make it easier to identify older art and writing and to make the inevitable Wikipedia deadnaming a harder sell. Which made the search namespace even smaller.
Finally I realised that I could extract a name from the handle that I had used in CaveTwitter, which I had already feminized in private chats as part of my first tentative steps forward. It had been rheoplex, and now it was rheaplex. So: Rhea. I wasn’t thinking in terms of precedents, my apologies to Rhea Perlman and Rhea Ripley. And I certainly wasn’t trying to hopscotch into the venn diagram circle of transfem names that are taken from grandiose mythological figures. I just sort of ended up there by accident.
Oops.
I’ve been Rhea for four years in private and three years publicly. It would have been less, but I accelerated my public transition when my art started getting more attention and I didn’t want my deadname getting baked into anything more than it already was. And the company I was working with at the time were very supportive, which I had been told they would be but it was still amazing to experience.
I like Rhea as my name. It fits. So I sits.