What's in a name, Dues Ex

This is a fun topic for me, fun because my chosen name seems so fateful, melodic, and true to myself all at the same time. Though it has touches of the tragedies that befall all our lives, I think the story is fun too. The impetus for posting this was reading Katie's latest blog post, http://in-myown-skin.blogspot.com/2009/05/whats-in-name.html

I was originally named after my birth father, I had his first and last name. He was killed (so Mom said) shortly after my birth, and my 1st stepfather legally adopted myself and my 2 sisters, giving us his last name. He also had a family tradition of assigning middle names of boys according to the names of US presidents, and I was given Thomas as homage to Thomas Jefferson; something I eventually carried forward when naming my own son Zachary.

Some time after this, my one older sister Julie was struck and killed by a drunk driver while crossing the street in front of our house. This left me as the oldest child in the family; though I was still very young at the time, I am to this day impacted by haunting memories of my older sister. Though their marriage eventually disintegrated as a result of this, I was left with my stepfather's surname for the rest of my younger life.

I served 20 years in the US Navy. Anybody military knows that when you report to any duty station, you typically get assigned a nickname. You can choose to accept the name or live in hell for the duration of your tour, since your discomfort will be readily apparent and capitalized upon to cause you grief!
My first shipboard assignment after training was in 1984 on a fast-frigate stationed in Hawaii. A popular TV show at the time was called "Riptide". In it, the main characters had a nerdy but loveable computer geek sidekick named Murray. One evening on duty shortly after reporting, this was our choice of entertainment. Someone in the group watching noted my resemblance to Murray and I was therein christened!
Despite, or because of the unflattering resemblance, the name stuck. REALLY stuck! My own name at the time largely stopped being used for anything but official correspondence as I was always introduced to all my social and work contacts as Murray. My first wife (in a convenience marriage) as well as my second wife (who was both a cast off love interest of my first wife and introduced to me by her) both knew me and introduced me to their families as Murray.

During my first marriage (one of convenience), my lesbian 'wife' helped me explore my fem self, and by extrapolating my nickname we came upon Marie as my first fem name. It's definitely fem, and I really took a liking to it right away.

I had several nicknames through childhood as well; it never seemed difficult or weird to accept all these different names; I wonder if perhaps this is a symptom or contributing factor to my lack of an identity that I……err, identified with ?

Many of my childhood and young adult fantasies revolved around magical or accidental transformations (gee, ya think?). For lack of a suitable female example, I therefore always identified most with Spiderman as a superhero figure. Around the time after my second wife left to be with women and before I had started transition, I was briefly involved with a man who was also a Spiderman fan. I took to calling him Tiger, and assumed the initials MJ.

My mother was killed shortly before my second wife left me. One of her longstanding unresolved wishes was that one of us name a child after our sister Julie. This had not happened yet amongst my siblings, and obviously I could not give my son Julie as any part of his name.

When it finally came time to decide my name, Marie was a given as a first name. I never had any real connection to my stepfather's surname, so I ditched it and took my birth father's last name. My middle name was trickier; it just seemed too morbid to take my sister's name directly, yet I wanted to retain it and 'J' as a middle initial. Hence Marie Julieanne Aponte was christened.

To this day I really love my name; the only difficulty has been that people often assume my first name to be Maria, given that my last name starts with A I can see that.