“I named myself after her”: Renaming strategies in a community of transgender women of the city of Lima, Peru
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14393/Lex-v25a2025-10Keywords:
First names, Name change, Hispanic names, Transgender identities, PeruAbstract
This paper examines the attitudinal and ideological motivations behind the practice of renaming – the process of selecting and using a new name – within Féminas , an activist group of transgender women based in Lima, Peru. The purpose is to identify rationales and strategies of members in choosing new first names and their (dis) alignments with Spanish anthroponymic patterns. The corpus comprises twenty-seven semi-structured interviews with transgender women with diverse ages, professions, and political outlooks. I analyze answers to the question “Why [insert name]?” For instance, “Why Jessica?” asks for the personal motivations for choosing the name Jessica . I found four renaming strategies: (1) participants derive a feminine-sounding name from their assigned masculine-sounding names, e.g., Gerardo > Gerarda ; (2) they adopt the names of women friends and relatives admired for emotional reasons; (3) they choose the names of popular women characters and celebrities; and (4) they continually rename themselves due to “excessive” popularity of some feminine-sounding names.
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