If I were famous, which I'm definitely NOT, my Wikipedia page would likely list me as Doreen Michele Traylor (nee Stanfield). This is a tell all piece and will dig through the dirt of my life and how that has impacted my choices as to what to call myself.
I don't have any delusions I'm all SPECIAL. I'm sure lots of other women have had some of the same or similar issues in life and wrestled with what to do about it.
If you are CURRENTLY wrestling with it, perhaps my personal anecdotes will help you sort your issue. This is also a gendered issue. Maybe laying it out will be a little pebble in the world's ongoing efforts to sort out sometimes stupidly hard problems that seem like they shouldn't be that bad.
Growing up, I was Doreen to most people -- except my German mother who added an -a sound to the end of that. She called me Dorina when I was little.
She couldn't actually pronounce my name. Most people who speak German or Spanish as a first language have trouble with the name Doreen and when I took French in high school and college, no one could even figure out how to translate that to French, so I went by Michele in those classes, adding an accent aigu over the first E.
It was fine in Greek class. It's a perfectly acceptable name in Greek and one possible origin for the name is the Greek language where it comes from the word for gift.
It can also be attributed to other origin stories and -- without looking it up -- in various origin stories from various languages and cultures can also mean moody or blonde, both of which are surprisingly fitting descriptors of me at times as my brunette hair readily turns blond in sunlight, salt water, etc.
But it's an uncommon name, as is my maiden name, and anytime there was a substitute teacher you could count on me being Darin Stafford during roll call. My maiden name is so uncommon, a friend once told me "Oh, it's the same name as that singer..."
No, it's not. Her last name is Stansfield, not Stanfield. I've seen my maiden name in exactly one movie in the decades I've been alive, a 2006 Harrison Ford film called Firewall. The main character's name is Jack Stanfield.
I spent my childhood imagining I would marry someone with a more common last name and this would resolve some of my problems in that regard. Then I actually got married and, if anything, my married name is worse.
It is pronounced like the word trailer and people who hear it spoken want to spell it that way. People who see it before they hear it often want to call me Taylor.
Like the name, Taylor, many surnames are real words and are based on old professions. Traylor isn't a real word in English.
My ex-husband's ancestors were French Huguenots who fled to England and anglicized their last name. It was originally something like Treilleur and the "ll" in the middle is like a Y in English.
I think it meant soldier and there was a long military tradition in his family dating back to The Crusades, to maybe around 1100. They changed the spelling and pronunciation to try to better fit in and I still have to live with the fact that they didn't do such a hot job in trying to blend. While I was a homemaker, I continued to go by Doreen. While living in California, going to college and attending public meetings as preparation for a career in urban planning that never materialized, I was running into people who spoke Spanish as a first language who would call me Dorina instead of Doreen.
I never corrected them. I wasn't offended. I had German relatives who said it that way.
They would eventually notice and apologize profusely and it would lead to an awkward conversation.
Around the same time, I also put an end to an illicit on again, off again affair (a situation where in the eyes of the law I was clearly his victim). I had reason to believe he didn't want to let me go and, in fact, he eventually hired a private eye to track me down because he couldn't find me of his own efforts.
So I began using my more common middle name of Michele and stopped using my distinctive last name online. I adopted a series of handles, Michele (something or other) in various online forums.
I hoped the more common name would both hide me from a man I was trying to avoid and also lower barriers to a career for me by making it easier for people to learn my name, say it correctly and avoid awkward conversations about how "Oh, no big deal, I have relatives who call me that."
The name Doreen Traylor is unusual enough that for years, when I searched for it, I found some British pianist who died a hundred years ago as the only hit. That is until I decided to use my full name online starting in 2017 because I really need to sort out how to support myself and it's problematic to try to hide my name while trying to do what I do.
I seem to be the most prominent female member of a discussion forum that historically skews strongly male and a lot of the most prominent men there use their real name or some variation of it as their handle or it wasn't at all hard to find their real name. At the same time, I was somewhat often told on that same forum "If your gender is a problem online, don't tell people you are a woman. No one knows you are a dog online if you don't tell them."
I concluded that men telling me online that it was on me to hide my gender to avoid trouble is part of the problem. Men do not get told "just HIDE your gender online." I concluded that I needed to be on record as MyFirstName AndMyLastName if I was ever going to have "a real career."
So in late 2017, I killed a bunch of online identities under various handles and moved to using DoreenMichele as my handle in most cases. The reason I did that instead of using DoreenTraylor is because I'm a woman and if I remarry, I most likely will change my last name again.
This is not typically an issue men have to worry about. Men can just be their first name and last name their whole life. Their last name doesn't usually say anything about their marital status and there are no issues with trying to decide what to do about what to call themselves and how to navigate changes to their private life and how that interacts with their public life.
Women have to decide what they wish to be known by. Women have to decide how to handle privacy concerns should they marry and take his last name because announcing the change tells the world details about your private life that aren't necessarily their business. Men don't have to spend as much time and effort worrying about how to navigate such transitions because they don't typically change their last name when they marry.
We handle such things in a way consistent with my hypothesis that women get raised to have private sphere roles as wives, moms and homemakers and men get raised to have public sphere roles and establish careers. The standard naming schemes we have are often criticized as being about men having property rights over women, which is not a completely crazy criticism, but the tradition of women changing their last name is because if your only adult role in life is as a full-time wife and mom, then you change your name to that of your new family so people know whom to associate you with.
If you are a homemaker, going by "Mrs. (his last name)" actually protects your privacy. It's no one's business what your maiden name is. It's no one's business what your first name is.
That breaks down when women start transitioning to real careers and it breaks down no matter how you choose to handle it. Women who keep their maiden name when they marry are often still called "Mrs. (his last name)" by people they are just meeting because that's a cultural norm. If they already know your husband, they often assume they know your name as well.
Some women drop their middle name, use their maiden name as their middle name and adopt their husband's last name when they marry (a la Hillary Rodham Clinton). This lets them keep some kind of continuity and identify with both their family of origin and their new family.
It still does not completely resolve the issue that the act of changing your name to your husband's name if you have a career and having to announce that to the world puts out private information about you incidentally that isn't really the business of people who have a professional relationship to you.
Whether or not you are married should have no real bearing on your professional life, professional qualifications, etc. It's assumed to not really matter for men and they do not by default signal such private info about themselves by doing something equivalent.
I watched a video once sometime before I decided to begin using my real name online and the guy in it used the last names of men he told anecdotes about but used the first name of some woman he spoke of. At the time, this annoyed me. I was ready to be all "Wow, what a SEXIST PIG -- and I'm sure he thinks he's all EGALITARIAN, etc!"
And then I began using my full name online but used only my first and middle names as handles on forums to leave myself the option to change my last name and I had to reconsider my judgy attitude.
What if she had gotten married and changed her name? Which last name should he use? The last name he knew her by when they were professionally associated? The last name she has now? What if she got married but he didn't know what her new name was?
Trying to navigate what to call myself "professionally"/publicly has been an excess aggravation and time sink in my life for a lot of years. I'm likely far from the only woman tearing her hair out over what seems like an excess of drama over what should be a minor detail.
But I stopped bellyaching about how my life would be vastly better if ONLY I had a more common name when I read an article about a woman named Lisa S. Davis and her 18 year long effort to combat "identity theft" only to learn it was a bureaucratic snafu involving another real person with her exact same name and birth date:
Men no doubt have their own concerns about what to call themselves online or for work or what not. I don't feel qualified to speak to that.
I don't have any delusions I'm all SPECIAL. I'm sure lots of other women have had some of the same or similar issues in life and wrestled with what to do about it.
If you are CURRENTLY wrestling with it, perhaps my personal anecdotes will help you sort your issue. This is also a gendered issue. Maybe laying it out will be a little pebble in the world's ongoing efforts to sort out sometimes stupidly hard problems that seem like they shouldn't be that bad.
Growing up, I was Doreen to most people -- except my German mother who added an -a sound to the end of that. She called me Dorina when I was little.
She couldn't actually pronounce my name. Most people who speak German or Spanish as a first language have trouble with the name Doreen and when I took French in high school and college, no one could even figure out how to translate that to French, so I went by Michele in those classes, adding an accent aigu over the first E.
It was fine in Greek class. It's a perfectly acceptable name in Greek and one possible origin for the name is the Greek language where it comes from the word for gift.
It can also be attributed to other origin stories and -- without looking it up -- in various origin stories from various languages and cultures can also mean moody or blonde, both of which are surprisingly fitting descriptors of me at times as my brunette hair readily turns blond in sunlight, salt water, etc.
But it's an uncommon name, as is my maiden name, and anytime there was a substitute teacher you could count on me being Darin Stafford during roll call. My maiden name is so uncommon, a friend once told me "Oh, it's the same name as that singer..."
No, it's not. Her last name is Stansfield, not Stanfield. I've seen my maiden name in exactly one movie in the decades I've been alive, a 2006 Harrison Ford film called Firewall. The main character's name is Jack Stanfield.
I spent my childhood imagining I would marry someone with a more common last name and this would resolve some of my problems in that regard. Then I actually got married and, if anything, my married name is worse.
It is pronounced like the word trailer and people who hear it spoken want to spell it that way. People who see it before they hear it often want to call me Taylor.
Like the name, Taylor, many surnames are real words and are based on old professions. Traylor isn't a real word in English.
My ex-husband's ancestors were French Huguenots who fled to England and anglicized their last name. It was originally something like Treilleur and the "ll" in the middle is like a Y in English.
I think it meant soldier and there was a long military tradition in his family dating back to The Crusades, to maybe around 1100. They changed the spelling and pronunciation to try to better fit in and I still have to live with the fact that they didn't do such a hot job in trying to blend. While I was a homemaker, I continued to go by Doreen. While living in California, going to college and attending public meetings as preparation for a career in urban planning that never materialized, I was running into people who spoke Spanish as a first language who would call me Dorina instead of Doreen.
I never corrected them. I wasn't offended. I had German relatives who said it that way.
They would eventually notice and apologize profusely and it would lead to an awkward conversation.
Around the same time, I also put an end to an illicit on again, off again affair (a situation where in the eyes of the law I was clearly his victim). I had reason to believe he didn't want to let me go and, in fact, he eventually hired a private eye to track me down because he couldn't find me of his own efforts.
So I began using my more common middle name of Michele and stopped using my distinctive last name online. I adopted a series of handles, Michele (something or other) in various online forums.
I hoped the more common name would both hide me from a man I was trying to avoid and also lower barriers to a career for me by making it easier for people to learn my name, say it correctly and avoid awkward conversations about how "Oh, no big deal, I have relatives who call me that."
The name Doreen Traylor is unusual enough that for years, when I searched for it, I found some British pianist who died a hundred years ago as the only hit. That is until I decided to use my full name online starting in 2017 because I really need to sort out how to support myself and it's problematic to try to hide my name while trying to do what I do.
I seem to be the most prominent female member of a discussion forum that historically skews strongly male and a lot of the most prominent men there use their real name or some variation of it as their handle or it wasn't at all hard to find their real name. At the same time, I was somewhat often told on that same forum "If your gender is a problem online, don't tell people you are a woman. No one knows you are a dog online if you don't tell them."
I concluded that men telling me online that it was on me to hide my gender to avoid trouble is part of the problem. Men do not get told "just HIDE your gender online." I concluded that I needed to be on record as MyFirstName AndMyLastName if I was ever going to have "a real career."
So in late 2017, I killed a bunch of online identities under various handles and moved to using DoreenMichele as my handle in most cases. The reason I did that instead of using DoreenTraylor is because I'm a woman and if I remarry, I most likely will change my last name again.
This is not typically an issue men have to worry about. Men can just be their first name and last name their whole life. Their last name doesn't usually say anything about their marital status and there are no issues with trying to decide what to do about what to call themselves and how to navigate changes to their private life and how that interacts with their public life.
Women have to decide what they wish to be known by. Women have to decide how to handle privacy concerns should they marry and take his last name because announcing the change tells the world details about your private life that aren't necessarily their business. Men don't have to spend as much time and effort worrying about how to navigate such transitions because they don't typically change their last name when they marry.
We handle such things in a way consistent with my hypothesis that women get raised to have private sphere roles as wives, moms and homemakers and men get raised to have public sphere roles and establish careers. The standard naming schemes we have are often criticized as being about men having property rights over women, which is not a completely crazy criticism, but the tradition of women changing their last name is because if your only adult role in life is as a full-time wife and mom, then you change your name to that of your new family so people know whom to associate you with.
If you are a homemaker, going by "Mrs. (his last name)" actually protects your privacy. It's no one's business what your maiden name is. It's no one's business what your first name is.
That breaks down when women start transitioning to real careers and it breaks down no matter how you choose to handle it. Women who keep their maiden name when they marry are often still called "Mrs. (his last name)" by people they are just meeting because that's a cultural norm. If they already know your husband, they often assume they know your name as well.
Some women drop their middle name, use their maiden name as their middle name and adopt their husband's last name when they marry (a la Hillary Rodham Clinton). This lets them keep some kind of continuity and identify with both their family of origin and their new family.
It still does not completely resolve the issue that the act of changing your name to your husband's name if you have a career and having to announce that to the world puts out private information about you incidentally that isn't really the business of people who have a professional relationship to you.
Whether or not you are married should have no real bearing on your professional life, professional qualifications, etc. It's assumed to not really matter for men and they do not by default signal such private info about themselves by doing something equivalent.
I watched a video once sometime before I decided to begin using my real name online and the guy in it used the last names of men he told anecdotes about but used the first name of some woman he spoke of. At the time, this annoyed me. I was ready to be all "Wow, what a SEXIST PIG -- and I'm sure he thinks he's all EGALITARIAN, etc!"
And then I began using my full name online but used only my first and middle names as handles on forums to leave myself the option to change my last name and I had to reconsider my judgy attitude.
What if she had gotten married and changed her name? Which last name should he use? The last name he knew her by when they were professionally associated? The last name she has now? What if she got married but he didn't know what her new name was?
Trying to navigate what to call myself "professionally"/publicly has been an excess aggravation and time sink in my life for a lot of years. I'm likely far from the only woman tearing her hair out over what seems like an excess of drama over what should be a minor detail.
But I stopped bellyaching about how my life would be vastly better if ONLY I had a more common name when I read an article about a woman named Lisa S. Davis and her 18 year long effort to combat "identity theft" only to learn it was a bureaucratic snafu involving another real person with her exact same name and birth date:
For 18 years, I thought she was stealing my identity. Until I found her
Footnote
I'm a woman. This post skews heavily towards the kinds of issues women have with "naming" themselves.Men no doubt have their own concerns about what to call themselves online or for work or what not. I don't feel qualified to speak to that.