“Naming a thing is the first act of creation.” — LMB
When I was an adolescent I had long, persistent fantasies of finding my lost twin sister. (I do not, to my knowledge, actually have a lost twin sister… although my parents can be sufficiently tight-lipped about anything they consider embarassing that hey, who knows!)
Lost twins were all the rage in the pop culture I inhaled back then (Luke & Leia; Adam & Adora) and, being generally a misfit who nobody liked, it was alluring to imagine that there was a perfect feminine girl-self of me out there, identical in every way, except… you know, girlish. More girlish.
And by dint of her being my lost twin, she would of course be the only person in the world with whom I could share everything and who would see me completely. I could picture her so vividly in my mind, this girl-me: dark hair in a bob, slightly different pattern of moles on her cheek, the same green eyes. I even gave her a name: her name was Leslie.
When I was a teenager, I started to write self-insert stories for the Star Trek universe, primarily Star Trek: The Next Generation. Except the self I tended to insert into those stories wasn’t “me,” wasn’t the bullet-haired boy that was emerging to the tune of “Matt Brown!,” a mononym (composed, admittedly, of two names) that has followed me for about as long as people have been asking me if anyone has ever told me that I look like Tom Hanks.
No, my self-insert character for my Star Trek adventures was a Vulcan doctor on the Enterprise, effectively Dr. Crusher’s second-in-command, named Dr. T’Raillai. She was three-quarters Vulcan / one-quarter Romulan on her grandfather’s side, probably because I always liked that hidden biographical detail of Lt. Saavik’s, and was irked that it never got explored more directly than in an out-of-canon novel. Plus, having Romulan blood let me/T’Raillai be a bit more hormonal and rageful than a nominal Starfleet Vulcan, which suited what was happening in my actual body as an actual teenager at the time.
When I was a newly-minted adult, my ex put me onto The Golden Compass, and told me that she really thought I should read it, and that the lead character, Lyra, was one of the best protagonists she’d ever met in fiction. I was not, at that particular moment, very receptive to whatever that particular ex really thought I would like, because to concede that she knew me well enough to make such a determination would be to concede that I had shown myself to her at all, and I lived (and live) in a terror of being seen in that way, for reasons that are only becoming clear to me now.
I, of course, concede it now. I loved Lyra from the moment I met her; or more accurately, I guess, she is the person in the entire universe — either invented or not — I most wish I could be. If I could go back in time, break the dimensional wall, wash up on the shore of the canals in Lyra’s Oxford and just start over as her, I’d do it immediately. Still.
This is starting to hurt. I’ll explain.
“Matt Brown!!”
But first, an aside. I mentioned a while back that I really do not like most of my nicknames. “Matt” began when I was a teenager and was so closely tied to (finally and for the first time) feeling accepted and liked by a group of friends that I also accepted and liked, that I could do absolutely nothing about it — “it” being the raw, mouth-feel ugliness of that syllable, a syllable almost as vile as the shit colour that makes up my last name, which is the second-least-interesting surname in the British patronymic language and yet somehow Matt Smith is making his work out just fine for him, so good on him and fuck me all over the place.
For my sins, the next iteration of my nickname smashed the two rude syllables together into the aforementioned mononym, “MattBrown!!” which is never spoken, always shouted, always shouted with something like a kind of delight, for which I am wearily grateful, but also, I hate it.
**No one who has ever used the mononym is responsible for my hating it. On this I must be clear. I could have spoken; I never have. This is on me.**
The sheer virality of that nickname — I genuinely don’t know for sure who started it, although it may have been Becca Wood 1, who is in all forms a genius and one of, like, five people who actually knows me — was astounding. It followed me everywhere; it seemed to self-generate in environments (workplaces; the pub) where no one else in the room theoretically knew of it ahead of time. I’m 47 as of this writing and I’m pretty sure someone will shout that motherfucking name at my funeral, and everyone else will smile. It’s a permanent part of me. So here’s me trying to kill it anyway.
The terror of being seen
When I was a little girl I learned very early that being seen for who I truly was would lead to pain. I blame about a billion people for this, only half a dozen of whom are real; and I would turn this particular neurological short-circuit off if I could, but I can’t, so here we are. When I was seen — truly seen — as a child, I usually got the holy shit beaten out of me for it 2; or (worse?) wholly rejected and shamed by everyone my age around me. All of the things that made me happy became secret behaviours that I shared with exactly one other person, plus the imaginary twin sister / self-insert character / whoever else understood me in my head.
I still live in this bizarre liminal space all these decades later, where I both desperately want to be understood (foot-stampingly so; I-refuse-to-repeat-myself-another-time so; why-doesn’t-anyone-ever-listen?!) and cannot stand to be perceived. The terror of being seen, mixed ruinously with the fervent desire to be known.
An example: the manuscript of Enneaka is out there right now, doing the rounds in some agent queries; and two or three times a day, the thought of this occurs to me, and I actually shout, out loud, “OH GOD” or “FUCK ME” or similar. It’s helpless. I cannot help it. It’s like some other voice just leaps out of me, whenever I make the mental connection to the image of that manuscript being read by an actual person, in spite of my also feeling like that manuscript is maybe the most important thing I’ve ever written. It would all fall under the feeling of someone walking across one’s grave, if it didn’t feel significantly more like being punched in the chest x the brain-shocks I used to get when I was transitioning off Wellbutrin. And it just keeps happening, and I just can’t stop it.
I have a lot of me out there right now, and it’s starting to hurt. But we’re doing this. Being alive is weird and fun and we’re all playing with Monopoly money anyway, especially now, so fuck it.
Lia Matthew Brown
I decided to change my professional name to better reflect my bigender sel(ves). I picked Lia because once I’d reduced all of the fantasy names I’d made up for myself and all of my others over the course of my life, a few recurring letters simply resolved into a word-form that, once I started saying it to myself (shyly, in the back of my head, telling no one), I found myself smiling (equally shyly, but at the front, the face part, the part that other people in the world might theoretically someday see).
Lia.
(El if you’re nasty.)
There is no action to you, the reader, on this. I’m not expecting anyone to call me this in the real world. I’m still a very male-presenting person and Matthew suits me fine. The full name will appear on scripts and on books and on this blog, and probably in emails and I dunno, merch? But what happens between myself and other actual people, well, that’s to be negotiated.
Like so many parts of coming out, this is so much more about what’s going on in my own heart than anything I’m projecting or expecting externally. I assume some of these feelings are common to queer folk like me but, I must admit, they all came as a marginal surprise once I started feeling them. And/or maybe it’s that terror of being seen, raising its fist again. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to be unobtrusive with all this — this is about me, not you, so don’t worry if you don’t get it; you don’t have to change anything, I’m the one who changed something — while also stepping into a definition of myself that feels more real, more alive, “more like the real thing,” than any Narnia I’ve been to before.
But, for now and for the record: I’m writing as Lia Matthew Brown. I use both masculine (he/him) and feminine (she/her) pronouns, and tend to shorten it to he/her in social media bios because I like the see-saw effect of that. My legal name remains unchanged (and lordy, I am not going through that process, at least not yet); I’m soliciting paid work (copywriting, project management, long walks on the beach) as Matthew Brown still; and I don’t expect anyone to stop calling me “Matt” because that’s easy and I feel foolish, and I’m 47 and I call myself “Matthew” when I’m referring to myself like that, so, you can too.
As for Lia, I’m out here now, trying to overcome decades of stunted adolescence in a single bound (zip! zap! zoom!), but not trying tooooo particularly hard cuz being a girl is fun and I’ve waited so long, and I can see myself in a way I don’t think I’ve been able to do for, like, 35 years. It’s nice to see my name in print, and I think “LMB” is a nifty way to sign off a missive. The first, say, three hundred people to call me El 3 are probably going to see me blush.
What a world this is, where you can hold your own hand and walk into the wild sky.
- On the subject of Becca Wood: she’s had some poems published recently, here and here, cuz she’s out there doing the work. ↩︎
- After writing this I felt compelled to clarify that my parents (at whom I took a potshot earlier in this post) were actually wonderful about my gender identity when I was a child. Bought me Pizzazz and She-Ra dolls without question. Modelled a very gender-inclusive household, all things being equal. I was bullied elsewhere. ↩︎
- Realized this is also Eleven’s nickname after the fact but I’m fine with it because she too is one of mine. ↩︎