thought about calling this post “what’s in a name?”

Immediately realized it was corny and that’s what we’re trying to avoid here

Corniness aside, I’m actually really excited to tell you about the name. Also, hi! I’m so happy you’re here and interested in reading my work and engaging with what I have to say. My queer brown nerd heart is bursting with joy. Today also happens to be my birthday🥳 (and yes, I deliberately made the decision to launch How Theysi It on my birthday so it would have the same birthday as me because #BigScorpioEnergy). I’m officially the age where, if my parents had health insurance, I’d be unceremoniously booted from their plan.

Birthdays and the complicated hellscape of US health insurance aside, let’s get back to the name!

How Theysi: naming conventions

How Theysi It (pronounced “how they see it”) is called as such because:

1) it’s going to be from my perspective, and thus about how I see, experience, and navigate the world around me.

2) I’m the they referenced in the title because I’m a nonbinary trans person, and that’s important to me and important for you to know. My pronouns are they/them (please don’t misgender me).

3) I’m Desi, (pronounced with more of a Th rather than a D sound. If you say it out loud and it sounds like a nickname for the name Desiree or like a cute little white flower, you’re saying it wrong. The spelling theysi is actually a pretty good phonetic guide!) which is a fun word encompassing a handful of South Asian identities and experiences, but it’s still not quite enough to capture the various ways I relate to and conceptualize my family history. I tried not to agonize too much over this word choice because

4) I love a good pun, but I love a good portmanteau perhaps even more. they + desi = theysi ! ISN’T IT CUTE!!! It’s ME! I’m the nonbinary south asian! I’m the theysi!

Cool cool cool. Really hyped myself up there, but it’s fine because now I have a ~brand~

Since we’re talking about names and naming conventions, and you’re presumably here to read some halfway decent writing, here’s an essay I wrote all about names. It was one of the essays in my MA capstone project, so if you’ve read that, it might look familiar. I think and talk a lot about names, especially since I had the great idea to change mine this year, and navigating that transition has been interesting. It’s been particularly interesting because the number 1 tip everyone gives you when you’re thinking about trying a new name is to use it at a coffee shop – so you can see how it feels when the barista yells out “medium cold brew with oat milk for Naveen” – but by the time I was ready to do so, all the coffee shops had closed and I was only hanging out with Camille (who almost never calls me by my name).

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In the years that my family manages to have their shit together, my mom likes to send out holiday cards. They’re fairly standard — usually a picture of my younger sister and me with some generic Shutterfly holiday greeting overlaid, or, in more recent years, a picture of the whole family. Either way, these holiday cards aren’t particularly interesting as simple festive objects; they get considerably more interesting, however, when you learn that my mom sends out two different sets of them. The only difference between these two sets is my mom’s name. Roughly eighty percent of the recipient list gets a card signed from Kumar, Riya, Alysha, and Nikki, while the other twenty percent gets one signed from Kumar, Kalpana, Alysha, and Nikki. 

My mom was given the name Kalpana Gobind Daswani at birth. Her middle name, Gobind, is also her father’s first name as well as her brothers’ and mother’s middle names. This is not a bizarre coincidence; it is customary in many South Asian cultures for children to be given their father’s first name as their own middle name. Additionally, when a woman gets married, she then must take her husband’s first name as her middle name. This is why my mom, her two brothers, and their mom all have Gobind as their middle name. (It’s almost as if this is supposed to signify that a woman is property, and you can tell to which man she belongs based on her middle name!!!!!!) Following this custom, my mom, sister, and I all have my dad’s first name as our middle name — Kumar. So like her mother before her, my mom changed her middle name when she got married. But that’s not all! She also took my dad’s last name, which was unsurprising and traditional. But the real kicker is that her first name also changed! YEAH. A big ol’ identity switcheroo. She went from being Kalpana Gobind Daswani to Riya Kumar Kundanmal; her whole name changed at age 25, quite literally closing out one chapter of her life to begin a new one. The practice of a newly married woman changing her first name is a Hindu Sindhi custom, and because many Hindu beliefs and practices are based in astrology, the cosmos dictate where and when and why many of these changes occur. A pandit (Hindu priest) will analyze the birth charts of both the bride and groom (also, can we take a minute to acknowledge the aggressive heteronormativity in all of this???), and based on this analysis, assess the compatibility of the couple. If there is something to be desired in terms of compatibility, the pandit will give the bride a new letter and tell her to choose a new name starting with said letter; doing so will make the marriage more harmonious. In my mom’s case, the letter given to her was R, so with the help of her mother-in-law, she came up with the name Riya. 

My mom has been Riya for just over half her life now, but even years before hitting age 50, she identified so much more with the name Riya than she ever did with Kalpana. I asked her many times throughout my childhood and adolescent life what it was like to change her name completely. It always managed to shock me how disconnected she felt from her birth name and the nonchalance with which she discussed feeling like Kalpana and Riya were totally different people; she was definitely a Riya. However, her parents, brothers, cousins, childhood friends all still call her Kalpana, which is why she sends out two sets of holiday cards. There was one year where she forgot and accidentally sent her own mom a card signed with the name Riya. Her embarrassment and anxiety was palpable as she paced around her bedroom muttering “shitshitshit” undoubtedly scolding herself for making such an error. I didn’t quite understand her frustration, nor did I understand how, during large family gatherings, my mom was attentive to both her names being in use at the same time without mixing up what to call herself to whom.  I swore to myself as a child that I would not change my first name when I got married because it seemed like way too much of a hassle, and yet, here I am at age 25, voluntarily trying out a new first name.

In the midst of wrestling with my gender and identity, testing out a different name felt like the next logical step in the throw-things-at-a-wall-and-see-what-sticks method of becoming myself. Going into this, I thought about the fact that my given name, Alysha, has actually always resonated with me. In addition to liking it, it has always felt fitting — so fitting, perhaps, that complete strangers have successfully guessed my name solely based on the assurance that I look or seem like an Alysha (this has happened on more than one occasion, and I am certain neither person had snuck a glance at my debit card prior to guessing). My relationship to my name has changed throughout my life and has included feelings of dislike, love, apathy, indifference, and discomfort. In elementary school, I vividly remember pleading with my parents to let me change the spelling of my name to ALICIA -- which I touted as the “normal” spelling. I was frustrated with adults looking at my name and mispronouncing it. I hated the spectacle and giggles it caused when I had to correct them; I wanted to blend in and be like everybody else (read: white). I didn’t have the words to describe it at the tender age of six, but I was experiencing a ton of internalized racism, and it was a hell of a drug. Other bouts of internalized racism peppered my adolescence, like in middle school when I became obsessed with The Beatles and only then began feeling any pride in my culture and religion because I learned of George Harrison’s fascination with and love of Hinduism. Or in high school when a friend, Meredith, described me as a “contemporary Indian” as if to separate me from all the other Indians who were stuck in some regressive, backwards, archaic mentality unable to keep up with Western society. But I took it as a compliment to mean that I had successfully approximated whiteness to her particular standard. Although I still sometimes struggle with internalized racism (much of it is trying to reconcile my queerness with my brownness and the ways in which European colonialism altered the sociological landscape and make it seem as though these two identities are irreconcilable), I grew out of the particular self-consciousness regarding my name’s spelling and learned to love it.

Having a non-American name seldom makes for nickname opportunities that aren’t pejorative; no one was about to casually call me by my last name in a cute, comradely sort of way when they constantly fumbled over its pronunciation. Despite me being their classmate, most of my peer’s first brush with Indian culture (Apu from The Simpsons does not count as representative of Indian culture no matter how much white boys want to believe so) came by way of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. While this movie definitely gave Indianness some cool points with it’s catchy song and bright colors, it also resulted in middle school boys pressing their hands together, nodding at me, and saying “Jai Ho!!!!!” as they passed me in the hallway. This acknowledgement-cum-moniker didn’t quite make for a sincere nickname, though, nor did I particularly want to be called any kind of ho at age 14 -- braces and questionable 2008-style side bangs commandeering my visage. 

Since I was a kid, the only real nickname I had was Lysh (always pronounced, yet occasionally spelled as, Leesh). I never asked people to call me Lysh; it always came about organically over time as the person and I got closer — they would just start calling me Lysh. It felt familiar, intimate in a way. It was a subtle indication that the other person felt a similar level of closeness to me as I did to them. My close friends and partner call me Lysh, but I always introduce myself as Alysha. Even as I started changing my display names on some social media platforms to just Lysh, it never felt right to introduce myself with it. It felt disingenuous and forced, like I was skipping over all of the foundational aspects of a new friendship and letting them into a place that others had to earn. It felt weird when I met Internet friends in the real world, and they called me Lysh off the bat because that’s what they knew based on my display name. Even with all of the emotional growth and evolution in the relationship I have to my name, it is the gendered aspect of it that now holds tension for me. When people see or hear it, they assume I am a woman because it is a feminine name. I don’t have any problems with the name itself but rather how it primes someone’s perception of me. To alleviate this name dysphoria, I scoured lists and pages of baby names to the point where I probably confused advertising algorithms into assuming I was pregnant. Throughout the course of this search, I came across a handful of names I liked, but most of them sounded really white, and I was adamant in not reenacting a European colonization upon myself while ghosts of the British Raj still haunted my homeland. I kept running into this problem because I was searching for names that were not explicitly gendered — or as mommy blogs like to call them — unisex names. I found myself increasingly frustrated that the names I liked were either painfully white or painfully gendered. 

The name Naveen showed up on a handful of different lists and sites once I started tailoring my search results to names with Indian and/or Sanskrit origins, and it hung out in the back of my mind long enough that it started to feel right. There are a handful of reasons I like Naveen and why I feel like it fits me well:

1. The etymology. Naveen has Indian origins, which I felt really strongly about. It meant I could maintain a cultural sense of self in something so personal yet so public as a name. 

2. The meaning. Naveen literally means “new.” I dare you to show me a more fitting option for a chosen name!!!) 

3. The reasoning. Similarly to when my mom got married, a pandit analyzed my birth chart when I was born. He made a series of suggestions, advisements, and predictions based on where the stars and planets were at the moment of my birth. One of these suggestions was what to name me. Rather than outright telling my parents what to name me, he gave them a letter my name should begin with. The letter is singular in Hindi, but the phonetic translation into English renders it as more of a syllable, “Na.” Evidently, I did not end up with a name starting with “Na” because my parents had already picked out the name Alysha prior to my birth. The chaati (naming) ceremony proved to be more symbolic and rooted in cultural/religious fulfillment rather than for the functional purpose of choosing a name for me. During this ceremony, the pandit analyzed my birth chart, reached his letter-searching conclusion, and my family members chose the name Natasha. My chaati name (which I just realized is an incredibly redundant phrase analogous to saying “chai tea” or “naan bread”) is in no way legally attached to my name in any way, nor does anyone call me as such; it is simply a cultural touchstone-turned-memory just floating in my subconscious. I often explain that a chaati name is akin to a confirmation name, and because many people in the US are familiar with the practices and lexicon of Catholicism, it makes sense to them.

Originally, I was looking for names that started with the letter A so I could retain my initials, (but let’s be real — it was mainly so I wouldn’t feel alienated from my favorite Anthropologie mug and subsequently disallow myself from drinking from it because of the large A painted on the side). however, none of the A names sat quite right with me. During my search process, I started gravitating toward a few names that started with K, but since my middle and last names both begin with K, I quickly nixed them from the list of possibilities. 

I like Naveen because, to an American audience, it doesn’t ring as explicitly gendered. Most of the familiarity with it comes from the Disney movie Princess and the Frog, in which the titular frog’s name is Prince Naveen. So even if it does signal a gender, people will probably assume the name belongs to a man, which I think I prefer because then they’d look at my face or hear my voice and have their assumptions called into question. Even though I’m not a man, it feels more exciting and less exhausting to be misgendered as one than to be misgendered as a woman. I feel strangely most gender euphoric when people look at me and aren’t quite sure who or what they’re looking at. My very existence challenges their internal biases and assumptions, and it ideally forces them to confront the discomfort that arises from not being able to immediately assume someone’s gender correctly based on the person’s hair, clothing, accessories, voice, name, height, body shape, size, or any other social cues they have learned to be indicators of someone’s gender. There is a great deal of unlearning to be expected when confronting one’s own biases, but that process seems far easier than the mental gymnastics involved in trying to analyze and scrutinize a stranger’s gender. This role playing as gender-detective could be entirely thwarted if people would stop assuming or guessing or gawking and just ask. In the same way that you can’t assume someone’s name before they’ve told you (okay except for the couple times that happened to me, but those were anomalies and, frankly, freaked me the fuck out), you can’t assume someone’s gender either. Let’s practice: Hi, my name is Naveen. My pronouns are they/them, and I am a nonbinary trans person.