--> hi! my name is bentl. you can also call me dd! =) here is my entire name:
--> ok wow alright what the fuck are you even looking at? what's what here? whats the first name and whats the last name? what's the fuck are all the slashes and shit? why are things on different lines? bla bla bla bla bla?
--> i don't know why i gave you such an visceral strawman reaction here, but regardless i'm happy to explain my name and its many intricacies!
--> for a tranny dyke fag such as i, language and names are a brilliant and infinite tool for gender exploration and self expression in general. my relationship with gender dysphoria has forced me to find alternative means of expressing myself since i wasn't so in love with being referred to with pronouns that define me by my genits and having a name chosen by people who didn't know me that was also chosen on the condition of whatever genits i had.
--> i don't feel satisfied with the name i was given, with the pronouns i was given, so let's find something else! something that makes bentl happy =)! and while i'm in the neighborhood of circumventing social norms to find a comfortable means of self expression, why hold onto any of these arbitrary guidelines for how i ought to name myself? for how i ought to use the english language? lets burn grammar to the ground and relish in these fucked up cool random beautiful strings of symbols!
"full name"
--> my full name is "dd o0 bentl". it isn't my entire name (on display at the top of the page), but it is my full name. ok, what does that mean? well, a full name is comprised of the 3 names that appear on your ID, right?
1. your first name is what you're called on a day to day basis, chosen from the hat of whatever biblical names are hot and trendy during that decade.
2. your middle name is just some free space for your parents to do some fuckshit.
3. your last name is your family name that you will then carry on to your child if you have a cock. if you have a pussy then sorry :/
--> it does!!!! in my opinion! i'm happy for those who find comfort in their fullname and/or the family ties that they represent, and sorry to dog on the format so much, but my mockery is directed at the powers that be who enforce these naming conventions onto all even if some of us may find them profoundly uncomfortable.
--> that being said, "dd o0 bentl" is my full name and adheres to the structure of a legal full name purely by necessity. i gotta have 3 names on my ID lest bentl will go in the poopoo bin. however! don't get it twisted! "dd", "o0", and "bentl" all individually mean something very different than the expectations set in place by the western 3-name naming convention.
bentl
--> bentl is my name! bentl is my most namey name and if my name were to be entirely shortened by necessity, i like to be called bentl =). however any one segment of my entire name can be used as a proper name for me!
--> "bentl" has a very important and special origin story to it which i'll have to explain in detail here. i had a very rigid and creatively stunting upbringing for most of my life. between family trouble and attending a christian unisex uniform enforcing high school, i never really had the proper outlet for fully exploring my identity. even my friends at the time were like gamer boys and i would often feel subject to ridicule for subverting their expectations. we were all into competitive smash bros and had to think of gamertags for the tournaments we attended. one weekend, we were all playing super smash bros brawl and brainstorming gamertags for ourselves. i didn't really have a good or consistent gamertag for myself and so i stared vacantly at the name entry screen, the game only allows 5 characters in a name. a very spontaneous thought came to me of a dog i had when i was a baby, it's name was bentley. i plug it in but it doesn't quite fit. the result is "bentl". it was quite random at the time and i didn't really understand the train of thought that lead me to putting those letters into the name entry box. my friend asks, "what's bentl?". i reply, "idunno".
--> in retrospect, i know that i said "i don't know" because the name bentl was a product of a very free and fluid and vulneralble creativity that has since become the centerpiece of my sense of self. at that time, i was afraid of it. i was afraid of my friends not understanding why i liked it because i didn't know why either. "bentl" is a really early indicator of a more free method of thinking, and for me that was a really sacred moment and it's why the name means so much to me despite it's pretty goofy origin xD!
dd
--> dd is my name! it is chosen primarily as a passing neurotypical name for job interviews and all that crap, but regardless it still has a special meaning to me =). i've flipped between quite a few names: avery, sally, dotty, and trixie just to name a few. however all of them felt like blemishes in the "wacky gibberish leetspeak paracosm" that is the rest of my name. but i love dd! why is that? what is it that dd has that those other names lack?
--> notice i didn't choose "deedee" or "didi", i chose "dd". this is key! as you may notice from my entire name, i'm big on symbols and letters as tools for creating visual patterns rather than tools for accurately representing words in their spoken form. i think it's a disservice to creative expression for letters to only be arranged in such a way that they can be easily spoken. the alphabet is a really beautiful thing when u step back and think about it! when all these symbols are strung together to create a giant wall of text (not unlike the wall you are reading) it's like an ocean of lines, textures, and amazing little repetitive intricacies that we don't even think about.
--> "dd" is great because it's just symbols. "d" and "d". when put together, there's no other way of saying it other than "dd", reading the symbols in sequence outright rather than mushing the symbols into a spoken form as you would when reading "didi" or "deedee". it's incapable of being mushed, there aren't any vowels! unless you say it as like tongue clicks which honestly i'm not opposed to haha.
dd or bentl?
--> "dd" & "bentl" are both a part of my full name in the first & last name positions but that is entirely irrelevant to their true meaning. they both are my name =) one as much as the other! i tend to prefer bentl as an umbrella name for myself, but i do like when close friends call me dd! there is no true first or last name for myself, just alternating names. "dd" being in front of "bentl" is purely because i think "dd bentl" is an aesthetically pleasing string of letters.
o0
--> "o0" is pronounced enceladus, in reference to saturn's sixth largest moon. i have an origin story for myself that goes into greater detail about my relationship with saturn and it's moon, but that's a webpage for another day. just know that saturn is my home planet and my fellow saturnians are all partying in the subsurface ocean of enceladus =) so "o0" exists at the center of my two primary names as an homage to my homeworld.
--> "o0" uses letters and numbers as logographic symbols to represent enceladus. the lowercase "o" represents enceladus and the "0" (which must be stylized with a slash) represents saturn and its ring.
entire name & underneath names
--> so my entire name is dd o0 bentl
-----------------------> psco9
-----------------------> y10bx7
-----------------------> a277773i//t-t-t-8yTR#!*^ and can't really be written in a sentence in any consistently convenient way. but it also isn't meant to because "psco9", "y10bx7", and "a277773i//t-t-t-8yTR#!*^" don't properly exist in the dimension of left to right written text. the way i wrote it above was mostly a simplification of an abstract idea, like trying to visualize 4th dimensional space.
--> a more apt way of visualizing it is probably as dd o0 bentl. notice the entirety of my name exists in purple underneath the following lines. my 3 other layers of names aren't meant to be written as much as they exist spiritually underneath or behind "dd o0 bentl". like imagine "dd o0 bentl" as the crashing waves of the ocean. we see the waves and thus we see the ocean, even if we can't concretely see all the wildlife that exists beneath!
--------------------------------------------------> dd o0 bentl
--------------------------------------------------> psco9
--------------------------------------------------> y10bx7
--------------------------------------------------> a277773i//t-t-t-8yTR#!*^
--> "psco9", "y10bx7", and "a277773i//t-t-t-8yTR#!*^" (lets call them my "underneath names" as a shorthand) individually don't mean so much. they are arrangements of letters that aesthetically really catch my eye, and specifically "y10bx7" and "psco9" have really stuck with me for some time for no real discernable reason other than i enjoy their visual rhythms.
--> "a277773i//t-t-t-8yTR#!*^" is kind of this comprehensive mush of a bunch of symbols and letters that i think are pretty and cool. most notably, it contains within it the number 27 which is a very important number to me. it's been my favorite number since i was little for no other reason except that it looks nice visually, definitely the earliest development in my visual relationship with letters and numbers.
closing letterstrings
--> i think a name is a beautiful and infinite thing, just as we all are. we have symbols and sounds that are meant to encompass our entireties, how does one do a thing like that justice!? how does one take the infinite beauty of the individual human and boil it down to some letters? it's absurd to even begin thinking about!
--> i don't claim to have encapsuled my infinite beauty with all my bells and whistles, but i do feel its complexity and depth better gets at the existential scope of my wonderful multitudinous existence. if not that, then at least it feels more properly "me".
--> anyways, can't wait for this page to become outdated in a few months when i change my name again =) #translyfe