What’s in a name? On journeys nominal and otherwise by Jade Kulhawy-Bartlett, R.Ac.
In a change that has been a long time coming, I have finally completed the legal name change I have been preparing myself for since I started at Heart & Hands. So, hi! I’m Jade Kulhawy-Bartlett, R.Ac. No more bracketing my ‘preferred’ name, which is an outmoded style that often confused more than it clarified. No more unwieldy long titles on my business card (the last name is enough!). In order to ring in this occasion I decided that I would like to bring you all on a little journey to examine the oral history of my name and the different meanings it has held for me on my path toward transitioning and putting my full self out into the world.
The first time I changed my name in any way was in 2017. I had been socially transitioning since 2013, and was moving away from the only city I had lived in as an adult. I was intending to perform one of the many incremental steps I would take on the long road to self-recognition, and this time the name everyone had called me since the day I was born was the point of tension for me. Certain parts of it, and not others.
My parents named me after the matriarch of my mother’s family; the woman who emigrated (the term privileged for white migrants) from Ukraine to the prairies with her husband and first child. This was a distinction I shared with a girl-cousin born a few months before me. My mother’s extended family pivoted around this woman, and we would gather every summer of my early life, dozens of us, to celebrate her life.
Having the ‘masculine’ form of her name was something that left me feeling simultaneously affirmed and not. I loved being named after a woman, especially one who was so important to the story of my family. The use of my name’s feminine form while I was growing up as an admonishment of my ever-present softness and femininity soured me on the easily accessible and obvious feminization of my name.
It also wasn’t different enough from my birth name for my sensibilities at the time. My journey up to then had only brought me as far as identifying as nonbinary – something that in my path was not the final destination but an internalized-transmisogyny-fueled pitstop on the way to trans womanhood. Being in this pitstop created a swarm of uncertainty and indecision. So I created a placeholder.
The process flowed as a bit of a checklist of associative impressions:
- My birth name started with the letter J, which I wanted to retain as a way of holding on to the connection to my great-grandmother’s name…
- One of my closest and dearest friends called me “J” and that gave the letter some additional emotional weight…
- I didn’t like Jay as a shortened-then-reexpanded form of the initial, too ‘masc’ for my sensibilities at the time…
- I needed some modified form, shaped in part by facebook at the time not letting me use a single letter for my first name while I was in this indecision period…
Thus Jaay was borne. As the months went on, people started to inquire about the name, compliment its uniqueness, and generally affirm my apparent choice. So maybe mostly out of vanity, it stuck.
Fast forward to early 2019 as I was starting to feel ready to legally change my name. Or maybe more-so the combined pressure points of my impending graduation from acupuncture school – whereupon I would start a business which would require the repeated use of a legal name – and changes in the political landscape in my province-of-birth were convincing me it was time. In the period since I had been living with two names (one legal, one social) I had become comfortable with this disjuncture. And also in this intermediary period a new name had emerged: Jade.
Inspired not by my time in Chinese medicine school (I swear), but rather embarrassingly by some enviable persona on social media, when I thought about applying it to myself the name just felt right in a way that nothing really had. I loved the long-drawn monosyllable, the softness of the ‘d’, the abruptness of its end. It felt lived-in and homey in a way that no other name I’d tried on had. Like a sweater that is worn in all the right places.
And so as I catalogued the steps of changing official identifications and accounts, returned to the notary several times, and prostrated myself at the feet of the deities of administration, so too did I let seep into the estuaries of my social ecosystem a whisper of my New Name. Thankfully this one seems to have taken root in me, far longer than the two years between my intermediary’s advent and its legal enshrinement.
At this point anyone who might have known me by another name hasn’t heard my new name only out of lack of a chance to tell, not out of a hiding or withholding on my part. That is the difference I feel most deeply as of late. The reintegration I feel of the various parts of myself that live in the hearts and minds of others, that is the most profound piece of completing the process of ‘name change’. Signifier merger. Whatever it can be truthfully called.
I think I always knew there would be a moment where I went through the legal change process again, where this final name ascended to the official and sanctioned heights of the state. I know that if I hadn’t pursued a licensed profession I could have likely made lighter work of the social and legal disjunctures. But in my practice I have always wanted to present my fullest self to people who come to work with me; in so far as that is part of the authenticity and genuineness that we require of those who walk beside us on our journeys of health and illness. To know parts of my journey, to know my Name, is to see the humanity on both sides of our equation, and to be able to connect your own journey with mine, however different they may be.
Have some journeys of your own to embark upon? I’ll see you under the felted clouds of the acupuncture room, or in the sunshine-y brightness of the cupping & gua sha room.
