Why I Changed My Name
A table is a table because someone decided to set things on top of its flat surface and name it “table,” and the rest of us agreed that’s what it was. We give things meaning, usually by naming them.
My mom named me Amanda Marie Woodard, giving me my dad’s last name, although she had only met him once. When I met him at 22, he couldn’t believe The Powers That Be would allow that to happen, simply give his name away without his permission. Mom named me Amanda instead of Alexis at the last minute because she thought the name was too sexy, worried that I would see its connotation as something to live up to—as if Alexis is the same as Cinnamon or Candy, as if those names actually imply the promiscuity we assign them, as if promiscuity is a flaw in being. Marie is just one of those middle names white women are assigned; it means the same as Nicole, Anne, Elizabeth, Lynn. It fills the space between Not Promiscuous (allegedly) and The Name My Father Didn’t Want to Give Me.
When I was a kid, Wishbone was one of my favorite shows. The main characters were Joe, David, and Sam, the latter a girl but a tomboy, a baseball cap concealing her blond ponytail. Tomboy was the closest word I could attribute to myself, and there was something about her boy name that appealed to me, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Boygirl Sam. I wanted to be her. In the third grade, I asked a classmate to call me Sam, just to try it out, and she said that was a boy’s name. She said it the same way kids called me a boy when my mom cut my hair too short. She said it to mean “ugly” or “wrong.”
It took some time to understand that Sam was short for Samantha. Other girls at school began going by Alex or Jo or other boy names. I learned girls had more flexibility in their gender performance than boys. Girls could play sports and wear makeup, but boys could only play sports. Girls could go by Sam or Cameron or Hunter, but boys could not go by Ashley. These were the rules.
Amanda was not a name one could shorten into a boy’s name. At least, culturally, I had not seen that done before. No one had paved a way for me, outside of A-Man-Duh. My mom called me Manny at home, not Mandy, but that didn’t feel right to bring into the world. That name was intimate, just for us.
I was in my early twenties before I focused on the “and” part of Amanda. I wanted people to call me Andi, with an i at the end, a reminder that I was still playing my role the right way. But I was too scared to ask people to change the way they addressed me. Nicknames were given, not made. No one would just call me Andi, so I let myself be Amanda for another decade.
Amanda. Amanda. I would stare at the name in print and marvel that it was mine. It never felt like mine. Just the symbol that pointed to me, the sound that meant me. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda. It didn’t mean anything.
During a women’s studies class in college, the reps of a queer club came to speak to our class. One of them used they/them pronouns, and I thought, “Yeah, I could do that.” I thought everyone could, though. We often refer to people as “they” when we don’t know their gender.
“The cashier is at the counter. They can tell you which aisle to look in.”
“Your doctor is seeing another patient. They’ll be with you shortly.”
But some years later, I spoke with a cisgender woman who said she understood what it felt like to be misgendered because someone had referred to her as “they” and not “she.” Not everyone was OK with “they.” But words didn’t make up gender. Did they?
I learned in my anthropology classes that gender is a cultural construct, a performance. There is a third gender in the Samoan islands, for example: the Fa’afafine. Zapotec muxes. Albanian burrneshas. South Asian hijras. They are made real by being given a name that their culture agrees to.
The name we have for a third gender in America is nonbinary. When I first came out in October 2022, I called myself genderqueer, an umbrella term, because I didn’t know if I could call myself nonbinary. Since I hit puberty, no one has ever looked at me and mistaken me for a boy. Beyond cutting my hair and dressing in alternative fashion, I didn’t plan to change my appearance, to alter my body. Sometimes my body felt wrong, but only because of what it meant to other people. Sex. Submissive. Nurturing. Women are more than their assigned roles, but the word “woman” indicates a place that I have never felt at home in. “Amanda”—A-Man-Duh—meant “woman.”
When I came out in October 2022, I told people it was OK to continue referring to me as “she” if that was easier. The pronoun didn’t bother me, really. I knew that people meant me when they said “she” or “her.”
But I insisted that they call me Andie. Andie, with an ie, not an i, not a y. Andie lets me be a person, a human being, and not a woman.
Before I came out, I had already considered changing my last name. I’m in my early thirties now. I made it past the age where I felt pressured to find a mate and get married. (The pressure for the mate is still there, and I’m working through that, but the pressure of marriage and all its implications is not.) I wanted my last name to be mine, to mean From My Father and From My Mother. Woodard is English, taken from Woodward, toward the woods. Hamer, my mother’s maiden name, is Dutch for “hammer,” as a role, not a tool, like a blacksmith. Carver means “one who cuts or carves.” Carver indicates an action done to an object, like wood, or stone. Like Andie means “both boy and girl,” Carver means both sides of my family at once.
A middle name is really a filler of space, regardless of gender. Choosing my middle name took a great deal longer than my first or last names. I wanted it to be something special. Something that said “neither boy nor girl,” to balance “both boy and girl,” something that named my spirit and not my body.
I was raised Christian, but I’m not a Christian anymore. Leaving the church was the right thing to do for me, but it came with no shortage of mourning. All the time, I miss the community and connection with God I once felt. As a teenager, when I was an Assembly of God Pentecostal, I felt the closest to God during “praise and worship,” the portion of service where the congregation sang together, regardless of talent, and lifted their hands in humility. These songs were sacred. Hymns. Psalms.
When I read the Bible, I remember feeling especially struck by the Book of Psalms, how much King David whined to God, worried God had forsaken him, and then praised Him in the next moment. David was allowed to be human, even in the Bible. In being human, he was close to God. That’s why I picked Salm. If the P is silent, I figured I’d just drop it. Plus, Andie P. Carver didn’t feel right. Andie S. Carver, though? Yes.
Yes. That’s me. Yes.