One (of very few) of the nice things about being transgender is that you get to pick your own name. So why am I Lucy Amanda Siobhán Anyte Emily?
Lucy is far and away my favourite name. Lucy is Anglo-French, from the Latin Lucius. Lucy means born at dawn – the dawn of my rebirth as a woman.
Amanda is my second favourite name. Amanda is one of the oldest names in the English language, appearing in a birth record from 1212 AD. I’m being a bit selfish, I know, but after my life so far, I really think I deserve to be Amanda. Amanda is the feminine gerundive of the Latin verb amare (to love) meaning [she who] deserves to be loved.
Of course, it’s also cool that Mr. Spock’s mother was Amanda. And Dr. Who’s Amy Pond too, really.
Siobhán is an Irish name, the same as the English Joan, and I basically just love the name. Pronounced shuh-VAWN.
Anyte of Tegea (Ἀνύτη Τεγεᾶτις) was an early 3rd century BC Arcadian (Greek) poet. Anyte was contemporaneously famous as a lyric poet, although none of Anyte's lyric poetry has survived. Anyte also wrote epic poetry, and was famed for that too, but none of it has survived either. Anyte was also a great epigrammist, and wrote many epitaphs. A handful of these survive.
The reason nothing of the works of this great poet survives is of course that Anyte was a mere woman. So I remember her. Pronounced ANN-ee-tay.
And finally Emily. It's a nod to Emily Pankhurst, who organised the British suffragette movement, but I’m really named after Emily Davison, an English suffragette who walked in front of the king's horse at the 1913 Derby, to protest against the oppression of women, and was killed.
And that’s why I’m Lucy Amanda Siobhán Anyte Emily.
