Living With a Dead Name: Vol. 1 A.B. Art

Changing your name is tricky. It took me 5 months to change my name to A.B. Art and I couldn’t be happier, but that pesky dead name keeps popping up!

For those of you that might not have heard this term before, a dead name is a name that you didn’t choose. It was chosen for you at birth and for whatever reason (often gender identity or transition), you didn’t want it anymore. So, it’s dead. It’s a dead name. And it is a challenge for people in this situation, because it can cause anxiety, depression, and dysmorphia. There are lots of research about this, so please feel free to google.

There is a lot of paperwork, money, energy, and TIME required to do it. For this reason, I waited 10 years to make it official. I’m not sure why I thought that it would be easy, that people from my past would go… hmm… 10 years is a long time… they ask their friends to call them that… they ask their kids to call them that… they publish with that… maybe I too should call them that… and to their credit many of my friends and family members from back home jumped right on board without me even asking or having a chat about it, but it still comes up.

CLASH [[[[[[[[[ DEADNAME ]]]]]]]]]]]CLASH

I know that dead naming is a jarring experience for a lot of people and I thought that it might be good to create a series of comics helping visualize that struggle by collaborating with my fellow name changers :) Like this image of cymbals CRASHING right behind me. That’s how it feels when someone says my dead name in an email, at the doctors office, in a meeting, at home visiting… and the list goes on.

If you would like to be a part of the series, please get in touch all it takes is an idea and a few pictures and I’ll do the rest!

abperformanceart@icloud.com