What's in a name?

My name

Something I was surprised by when I first came out as trans, was the number of people who asked about why I’d chosen the name Zac. Initially I struggled to put into words how it had come to be my choice of name, it had simply felt right to me. It was after I had first spoken to someone about being trans that I seriously started to consider what I would like my name to be, I remember sitting on the bus trying out names in my head. I considered going for a more gender neutral name, like Alex, or Sam, but those didn’t sound right to me. Then I said the name Zac to myself, and it felt right, it felt like my name in a way my birth name never had.

But there is more to the name Zac: from about the age of 7 until I was 15 I lived a vivid alternate reality inside my head. Zac, or Zacchaeus, was a character in that world, and I eventually realised that Zac was me.

My full name is Zacchaeus, which is a biblical name, from Luke’s gospel. It has significance for me, as Zacchaeus was a short tax collector, someone who was disliked by most of society, and not particularly honest. He climbed a tree to see Jesus, Jesus stopped, and told him he was coming to his house for tea. Jesus didn’t see this man as everyone else saw him, and I don’t believe He sees me through the same lens as everyone else.

The blog’s name

My blog is called Transistence as I aim for it to be a record of my trans existence, a journal of my experience of life. The similarity to the word resistance is also not accidental, my whole life I have felt different, always at odds with my communities, and resisted people telling me how to live my life.