I grew up with an extremely rare last name. According to forebears.io, only 156 people in the world have my original last name. It's an obscure variant of a surname that's only slightly more common (forebears.io tells me that just over 19k people have it, which is still pretty low), and both are variant forms of an ethnic slur.

To say it affected me negatively is an understatement. Nobody could spell it right, and nobody could pronounce it right. It made me feel like a freak because I was the only person I knew who had to spell their last name when giving it to people. And they still got it wrong. I've had my name misspelled on important documents, such as my lease and my electric bill. I hated the last name I was born with with the fury of a thousand exploding suns.

Before I accepted that I was both trans and aromantic, I used to fantasize about getting married to a woman with a common last name like "Smith", taking my wife's last name, and giving the finger to anyone who tells me that a man shouldn't take his wife's name.

Of course, I eventually came to accept the fact that a) I'd be much happier as a woman and really don't want to be a man and b) the idea of getting married or even being in any kind of romantic relationship actively disgusts me, so that fantasy went away and was replaced by a newer, more plausible fantasy, one that I eventually fulfilled: transitioning to female and legally changing my entire name.

One of the hardest parts of my transition was choosing a new last name. My first name came easy, and while it took me a while to settle on a middle name, I was solely concerned with aesthetics for that one. But my new last name had to be perfect. It needed to have no variant spellings or variant pronunciations, it needed to be monosyllabic, it couldn't give away my ethnicity (I was sensitive about my old surname being a slur), it needed to be common, and I needed to like the sound of my initials (my initials were the only thing I ever liked about my deadname). It took me ages to find one. I even considered Korean surnames (particularly "Park"), because Korean was a language isolate (cognates are the biggest sources of variant spellings, and language isolates have no cognates), all Korean surnames are monosyllabic, and I liked that it would totally mislead people as to my ethnicity, but I eventually rejected them. Eventually, I relaxed my definition of "common": instead of requiring it be common as a last name, I'd also accept names of common household objects. And then I stumbled on the perfect surname, which also happened to be the literal English translation of my mother's maiden name, so I still had some kind of family connection without being obviously ethnic. While it's not super common as a last name (only 24k people according to forebears.io), it has an advantage in that it's one of the most common household objects you can think of: Book. If someone does mishear my name (and I have had people mishear it as "Brook", "Brooks", or "Buck"), all I have to say is "it's like the thing you read".

You have no idea how happy I am now that I'm not saddled with that awful last name I was born with. All those awful feelings went away as soon as I walked out of the courtroom with the signed court order for my name change. I'm actually proud of my last name now.

My name is Amy Jessica Book, and I love my name, which was something I was never able to say before mid-2014.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of my first and middle names: my old and new first names were roughly as common for my birth year in the US (two places apart) and both in the top 20, and my new middle name is much more common than my old one ("Jessica" is the 2nd most common girls' name for my birth year, and my old middle name didn't even crack the top 200 boys' names). Funny thing is that my old middle name is technically gender-neutral, but I've only ever even heard of one woman with that name, and she's a famous actress. It's also more common as a last name than as a first name, thanks to a certain astronaut. I like having common first and middle names. I don't want to stand out, and I like the anonymity that having very common first and middle names give me. I have to admit that I did consider "Sunset" as my middle name, because I liked the dichotomy of having a really common first name and an ultra-rare middle name, but I'm glad I made the choice I did (if only because AJB looks much nicer than ASB; I can even write the former as a ligature). "Amy Book" is even ungooglable, since googling it returns a ton of results for "Amy's book".