The Artist Formerly Known As…

This is the card I’ve designed for myself to announce my name change (click it to embiggen and clarify, wordpress is resizing it and making it all artifacty). I’ve been pretty careful not to use my “real” name on this blog, but it’s really hard to talk about changing your gender without talking about changing your name. So here it is: moving from A to Z, Andrea becomes Zachary. (Also, I must give thanks to The Artist Formerly Known as Prince for zir contribution to the American idiom lexicon, which entry I have appropriated to my own purposes.)

I made the card because I joined an Artist’s Way group, and we had to make name tags for ourselves for our first meeting last night. Some of the people in the group are strangers to me, and some are people who knew me as Andi/Andy, so I decided this would be the ideal opportunity to unveil the new name, the gender transition, and all of it, with humor and style.

It’s still all new and strange, but I think I can get used to answering to Zach. It’s got a z in it, so it’s got some kin to Nezu, which is a name I answer to, and it has a soft a, which matches the a in Andy. I kind of liked Zeke as a nickname, but somehow Zach fits me better I think. Zach for Zachary. I’m keeping the Andy as a middle name, so it’s Zachary Andrew. That way people like my family who don’t want to change will still be calling me by my actual name. And I’ll still be named for our family friend Andy.

Here’s another awesome part: my last name starts with M, so my initials are ZAM! It needs the exclamation point, don’t you think? ZAM!

Also, is that not an awesome design? (Caveat: I’m a graphic designer.) Now I know I’m prone to being in love with my designs when they are fresh and new, but I’m really quite in love with this one. I want to make it a t-shirt with just the graphic elements. Can’t you just see it with foil embossing on the people symbols? I could do pink for the boy and blue for the girl, just to be extra queer. It could be a tattoo. It could be a greeting card. I should probably sit down and make an MTF version, too.

Yeah. And then I’ll sell my awesome t-shirts and so forth and raise money for chest surgery. It’s a plan.

~ by Nezu on 7 June 2011.