So, I need to start off with a content warning. This post will talk about abuse, sexual assault, and slavery. If you find these topics to be upsetting, please do not read this blog post.

I tell a few different stories about my name. One of them is that I am the last of 14 children, which is true but has nothing to do with my name. I also say I was named after my grandfather, and that is almost true. I was actually named after my paternal grandmother. We both hated the name they had given us. I also hated the trauma I had suffered under that name. My mother had a way of pronouncing my name that sounded like hate. Because of this, I came to hate the name she had given me. She also gave me a horrible nickname that I came to associate with sexual abuse. My mother never sexually abused me herself, but another family member did, and my mother paired them with the use of the nickname, which I then began to associate with being molested. A major part of my healing from the abuse of my mother and other family members was to change my name and become reborn.

My grandmother also associated the name with pain. Her father (my paternal great grandfather) was freed by the emancipation proclamation. My grandmother was never a slave, but she was raised by the same family that had owned her father. They also named her. For my grandmother, the name became synonymous with all the racism she endured in her life and all the suffering that slavery inflicted on her family. She always supported my decision to change my name. My mother did not. I was not able to change my name legally until after I had emancipated at the age of 16. I would change it twice. When I was 14, my cousin and I watched an old movie with a female lead named Christopher. She was everything I wanted to be. So, at age 15 I started going by Christopher, but I hated the nickname Chris. When I was 17 Prince came out with the song “Kiss,” which I thought would be an amazing nickname and changed my name to Kisstopher.

Most people called me Kiss throughout my twenties. In my twenties, I was a sex worker and came to associate the nickname Kiss with sex work. In my thirties, I stopped doing sex work and became Kisstopher, no longer using a nickname. For those of you who asked me about my name and got the short easy answer or some other story, I hope you can see why I don’t always give the long truthful answer. From now on, I will refer people to this blog post if they are curious about my name. I don’t share my birth name because it is a popular name and I don’t want to ruin anyone’s name for them. That, and I really do not like it when people address me using my dead name. People do this to either hurt me or to create intimacy they have not earned. Both are offensive and will cause me to distance myself from a person. You already know my name, and it’s Kisstopher.