What’s in a Name?

My name is Fiona Kelly McGregor; it is an amendment. I was baptised Fiona Mary Christine in accordance with Catholic tradition. As the eighth child, I had a better chance of getting a fresh name, the list of family members to honour and replicate having been exhausted. My parents fought over what my Christian name was to be. My mother wanted to call me Lily, my father Fiona. My father won. The name I was schooled under – Fiona McGregor – was as Scottish as tartan but we weren’t very Scottish at all. In that sense, my name wasn’t true.

McGregor of course is the patronym and as such leads up only one branch of the family tree, bypassing sundry Irish names, I imagine to the relief of my father, who did not want people – including his own children – to know he was mostly Irish in origin. When he died, we found a velvet-lined box in his wardrobe containing the clan Gregor coat-of-arms, a kitsch object no doubt made for the huge diasporic tourist market. To me, who’d begun researching the family tree around that time, what this relic represented was my father’s fervour to be seen as Scottish, which in turn represented the ethno-religious hierarchy the English exported to all their colonies – along with pestilence, invasive species and carcinogenically low melatonin. (English > Scottish/Welsh > Irish. Scandinavian and Germanic peoples were above the Irish. Southern Europeans were at about their same level, and everybody else on the planet was below.) My father was born in 1915 and studied law on a scholarship. Ascending the ranks as an Irish Catholic during this era of fierce sectarianism would have been far more difficult than as a Scottish one. Discrimination was real, and centuries old.

Mary Christine were my mother’s middle names. I added to their anodyne Catholicism when forced to choose a Confirmation name; I opted for Jane, I have no idea why. My loathing for the Church was already well established: no saint appealed to me. By the time I was an adult, all my names chafed, but I didn’t have the guts to change Fiona to Lily, nor get rid of McGregor, and I did want a bestowal from my mother, so I took her family name – Kelly – as my middle one. With its adroit gender parity and use as both a first and last name, its central position is apposite. I have also always felt more like a Kelly than a McGregor due to the abundant cousins on the Kelly side – thirty-five to forty in the first generation (I forget the exact number; some have died). And don’t ask me how many second, third and first-cousins-once-etc.-removed I have. Hundreds. Thousands? On the McGregor side I have only two cousins.

It was easy to change your name in the 1980s, before the internet and digitisation were established. Each time I got a new Medicare or bank card, I’d change Mary Christine to Kelly. By the time I renewed my passport in 1995, I was Fiona Kelly McGregor on all my documents, so a signature from a Justice of the Peace was all I needed to seal this name. I felt immediate relief.

What my father didn’t know was that the name Fiona had been invented in the eighteenth century by Jacobite Scottish poet James Macpherson in the Ossian cycle, a collection of poems Macpherson claimed were translations of ancient Gaelic epics, but which were later proven to be of his own invention.

Mourn, ye sons of song, mourn the death
of the noble Sithallin. Let the sighs of Fiona
rife, on the lone plains of her lovely Ardan.

Fiona was not a person as such, but a female personification associated with battle, like Britannia.

The star of the Ossian cycle is Fionn Mac Cumhaill – or Finn McCool – an ancient Irish mythical warrior whose followers, the Fianna, feature in The Fenian Cycle, a vast body of early Irish literature. In Old Irish, finn means white or fair, and is cognate with Welsh Gwyn, Breton gwenn and Cornish gwen, the latter being my mother’s first name. So in all its oblique and literary heredity, and its return to Ireland, you could say my name is true.

Nomen est omen.

My interest in names began in the early 1990s when, in between books, I went to drift-net fish at the State Library and discovered a shelf of tomes about names. Mc or mac, like von or de/di/da, means son of. I’d like to say child not son, but the earliest record in our family tree, from the seventeenth century, shows women often noted only by their first names when they marry. At this time, many people across the world did not have surnames, at best named by association with landforms, locations, trades and so on.

The etymology of Gregor goes back to the Greek Γρηγόριος (Grēgórios), which means watchful or alert. In a document predating my McGregor ancestor’s 1853 arrival in Australia, our name is spelt MacGregor; I have no idea what precipitated the change. I do not carry the burden of non-Anglo Australians constantly asked to spell their names, although I have to point out em see, not em ay see. Over time, as Australia’s ethnic diversity has increased, I have found myself needing to spell my name more. In Europe or Latin America, it is a painstaking process. It’s refreshing how unusual my name is in those places. Fiona sounds better in latin languages: easily pronounced yet strange. McGregor is a mouthful; Kelly sounds silly anywhere. After one sojourn in France, I checked into an Edinburgh hotel room with relief. When I introduced myself to the receptionist, he frowned, ‘How do you spell that?’

Qual’è la differenza entra un nome e un nome?
– Fleur Jaeggy

In January 2020, on a beach in Oaxaca where I was travelling with a Mexican friend called Miki, an Italian woman was introduced to me as Fion. She had adopted this name because she liked the sound of it and disliked the name she had been born with – Beatrice – which in Italian to my ears sounds pleasing. My presence astounded her as I was the first actual-born Fiona she had ever met, and she had no idea of the origin of the name. A lively conversation between Beatrice, Miki and I ensued, about our names and what they all meant.

A couple of years later, when I saw her in Rome, Beatrice had become Beuz. She invited me to a workshop whose purpose was to re-learn how to play. In the first exercise we had to write words on different coloured Post-it notes: on green a colour, on yellow an adjective, and on pink something I understood as ‘one’s essence’. For this, I wrote ballare – dancing. As the exercise unfolded, I realised that the word on pink paper was supposed to be a noun. My mistake wouldn’t have mattered in English, where words that are both nouns and verbs proliferate. In Latin languages the word for noun and name is the same.

After a turn around the room, we exchanged our Post-it notes of nouns, colours and adjectives. My ballare ended up on a man in the far corner and I became an orca, rosa, curioso. I was comfortable with the gender clash. But the noun felt wrong. I didn’t feel like a whale.

Beuz was accepted by this band of people in her name-changing quest, which by now had extended from social media into her everyday life. Like Miki, she had short hair, presented as butch and lived openly as a lesbian, a far more radical undertaking in Mexico and Italy than in Australia. By the time I left Rome a few months later, Beuz was texting me in non-gender-specific Italian, a feat achieved by using – for nouns pertaining to people, including Beuz themselves – the letter ə, the schwa in phonetics, known as the weakest vowel sound and pronounced ‘uh’. Beuz was a ragazzə. Hispanic Latinxs do it like that, with an x.

My name is Beuz Martino Barbella. My name is a work in progress. When I was born, I only had my father’s surname, Barbella, and my family chose the traditional first name for me: Beatrice was my father’s mother. I never liked being named after my grandmother, and Beatrice in Italian literature is a symbol of heaven and ethereality which is far from my nature. In 2008 when I joined Facebook and didn’t want to give away anything personal, I chose the name Fiona because this name sounded to me like ​​lightness and freedom; it was also the name of a famous Black Italian athlete I admired. Years went by, and I needed to change my name again. I’d always found the gender binary restrictive, but it was only in 2020 that I found the strength to give myself an androgynous name. Some friends had already nicknamed me Beuz, and the school where I now teach supports it. I haven’t always had three names. But last year in Italy a law was passed that gives people the right to take their mother’s surname; before, you could only legally take your father’s. So now, I will put both on my documents: Martino Barbella. My life has changed for the better as Beuz, even if I can’t completely explain it.

My name is Miki Cabrera Luna. My name is a rewrite. In Mexico we mostly have two surnames and they are really important, the first being from the father and the second from the mother. It’s a Spanish custom so the names are nearly always Spanish, though in states like Chiapas you might see indigenous names. Unusually, both my surnames are from my mother because when I was a baby my parents split up and my mother didn’t want me to be named after my father. Miriam, my birth name, is an Arabic name, but I’m not Arabic. My mother was born in Mexico City of Spanish and Nahuatl ancestry and was light-skinned, my father was Mixtec from the coast of Oaxaca; he was Afromex. He died when I was fifteen so I never really knew him but I feel him in me. My mother spoke a lot about my father before her death when she had dementia. She would say how like him I am in looks, temperament, taste. Like me, he had a short fuse, colitis, and he loved to eat chilaquiles. He was a real cabrón heh, he had a lot of affairs. Later I found out that he named me Miriam after one of his lovers. I was like, You’re kidding! My best friend Gabriella used to call me Mika when we were kids. I always found it so cute and when I started DJing I took the name Mikitronic. I am Miki now all the time. I prefer it.

So many things to escape that names trap us in: fathers, husbands, families; genders, customs, countries, ethnicities, characteristics. This essence that the name/noun bestows can become a poison when applied to a self that manifests differently.

I became fascinated with the dynamics of names, of all they tell us about provenance, history and language. Few if any are untouched by colonisation. Few are neutral to gender; nearly all uphold patriarchy. Names are in a constant state of evolution, in the choices individuals make with their own, or the choices their parents made, or indeed whichever authority stamped a newborn with this requisite noun. They tell us about fashions, ruling powers, epochs. Names are at once masks and revelations. They provide access and create impasses; along with skin colour they are lightning bolts for racial profiling.

When people asked me why I now used three names, their own name stories flowed back to me with astonishing variety. Within this handful of proper nouns, so much pathos, humour, mystery and pain. Merely from people I knew, I found stories of origin and flight, of refuge and refusal. I learnt about ancient customs, upheld as well as ruptured, sometimes within the one name. I saw maps unfold across the globe and traditions receding so far into the past they were barely decipherable. What to one culture may seem dizzyingly complicated is, to another, ordinary. Names may contain history’s greatest upheavals in all their pitilessness and terror, as well as one person’s whimsy, or life-saving choice. I began to transcribe, and sometimes translate, these stories, working over the written versions with each of the tellers. We share some here as a beginning.

My name is George Khut. I was born Poon-Khin Khut: my father insisted we all have Chinese names and my mother went along with it. In China, family names go first so my name is written as 屈本慶 and on my birth certificate it’s Khut Poon-Khin – as spoken in Hakka. Chinese tradition gives you a prefix according to the family’s ‘generation poem’. So me and all the males on my father’s side have first names beginning with 本 ‘Poon’, and all the females names beginning with 秋 ‘Qu’ or Chu/Chiew. The Chinese character for Khut means bent, crooked or stooped. So there you go! Of course, the pronunciation is different again in Mandarin and Cantonese, and the hard thing is I can’t even pronounce my own name cos I never learnt Chinese with its complex tonal system, so all that talk about authenticity is complicated and troubling for people like me. Growing up in Adelaide in the seventies and eighties there were hardly any Asian kids so I was enrolled in primary school with the name Kym Khut to avoid being teased, but I copped so much shit my parents sent me to a private school. In high school I didn’t want to be called Kym anymore so I became PK. I picked the name George when I moved to Sydney in my early thirties. I wanted a fresh start, and to not be burdened with the chore of explaining my name. George was the name of my mother’s grandfather and an uncle; her background was English or Welsh, maybe Irish? I don’t know. I had sooo many problems with my passport and birth certificate – constant misspellings – a total pain in the arse! When I changed my name by deed poll to avoid this, I merged Poon-Khin into Poonkhin, which helped, but it was sad to break from my family. I dropped my middle name altogether when I was in my forties because it was so hard to pronounce it just got really annoying. Some of my old friends still call me Poonie. I don’t mind. At that private school, they taught phonetics for a couple of years, which I think was a worthy attempt to help us pronounce foreign words. Saying a name correctly feels important for me – or at least attempting to. It’s a way of honouring a person’s heritage. It’s acknowledgement of the specifics of who we are.

My name is Jiva Jehanathan Parthipan. My name is a passport. I made it up when I first went to England at the age of fifteen in the 1980s to get away from the war. I mostly just use Jiva Parthipan, or ஜீவா பார்த்தீபன் in Tamil. In our community in Sri Lanka and parts of India we don’t have fixed surnames, we put our first name at the end. Some Tamil Hindus have village names as their first names, especially classical musicians. It’s like how European surnames often came from places – brook, hill, wood, and so on. Parthipan is the name I was called when I was born and Jiva is my pet name. So, if I had a child, their surname would be Jiva, you see? A UK trans Tamil friend of mine said to me that my own name becoming my surname made them think how, in a sense, we leave our parents, and we become our own parents in the new land. I know it can be confusing but I didn’t Anglicise anything, whereas that’s not uncommon. When I had to get a passport, I took my father’s name, Jehanathan, as my middle name. A lot of people called Jehanathan, for instance, dropped the first two syllables when they went to England and became Nathan. I suppose the name Jonathan says something about the Hindu-European language group. You can always tell who’s Tamil by the -a suffix. Armenians have the same suffix, I’m not sure why. And oh my god the bullshit I went through crossing borders with this name after 9/11. You wouldn’t believe it! I wrote a whole show about it! When I was on tour as an English performance artist, I was always stopped at the airport. It was a bit of a joke, I mean, I’d even done a performance based on a YouTube clip which gave instructions on how to make a bomb, bahahahaha! But it could also be really, really awful. I could be detained for hours, as a brown man, a South Asian, you know.

Once I decided to roll out my full name beyond private documentation, things became more complicated than I had anticipated. My sixth and seventh books were contracted, but the publisher was reluctant to implement the change to three names and I was still not confident enough to insist. Forms and documents usually only have two spaces for names; if there are three spaces, the middle name often drops off the final correspondence. But I became more certain as time went on that all three of my names needed to be used, partly because my old two-word name had become so generic (it was not till my generation that Fiona became popular as a first name) and in the digital age, a generic name is a nuisance for a sole trader. Artists are even more implicated in this queasy capitalist corollary of name as brand. These concerns aside, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all three names were always necessary. The elision of the middle one, so fundamental, vexes me no end. For many cultures, three names is already an abbreviation.

My name is Susana Vaz da Silva Castro da Nery. Well, that is my full name. Portugal is a bit like Spain in that we take our surnames from both sides, but we have two from each, so you carry two generations. It’s the mother’s mother and father, then the father’s mother and father. It’s difficult in an Anglophone country because the computer systems don’t accept that many words. People choose to cut out some of the names or join them, so I never know what my name is going to end up as in my visa applications. I never know what’s going to happen at the airport and I travel a lot for work. When my son was born in Angola, he was Mohen for the first three days of his life – that’s a name in Kimbundu, his father’s language – but then I decided to name him Martin after Martin Luther King. For his surnames, I violated the rules. I should have given him my father’s two names but instead I gave him one of each of my parents, so he is Vaz Nery like me. My son’s full name is Martin Vaz Nery da Silva Cardoso. That’s right, he ended up getting a ‘da Silva’ anyway, but from his father’s side. Ha! Well, da Silva is the most common Portuguese name. I don’t know any Angolans with indigenous names. Maybe that will change. Anyway, you can imagine the nightmare going through customs for both of us. I’m an academic and Vaz Nery is the surname I publish under, but mistakes are made there as well. Then there is a whole other story about what happened when I tried to open a bank account for Martin here in Australia. Don’t get me started.

The further back we go, the easier it was to change one’s name. Criminals and others needing refuge from the law could buy time by giving an alias if apprehended by the police. Unless the arresting officers knew them personally, disproving the name they gave on arrest was difficult. Over time, habitual criminals could build a formidable archive of names, the women able to offset the privations of marriage with a more extensive palette to choose from. Early twentieth-century NSW Police Gazettes contain lists of criminals’ nicknames. Baldy, Face, Skinny, Hoppy, The Dude, The Count, The Kid from Spain. Nosey, Hands, Yapper – anything describing physique or skill set, character or habit. And, inevitably, endless iterations of racial epithets. Interpreting nicknames, you also had to take into account the Australian flair for ironic inversion. Blue, a nickname for redheads, is in widespread use to this day. The templates of charge sheets rarely had enough room to accommodate the most inventive recidivists. The two lines at the top of the page often overflowed, the names becoming more flowery, fanciful and funny each time.

Millicent Mary Agnes Fahey was the alias of a woman on whom a main character in my novel Iris is based. Kathleen McLennan is the name she was most commonly known by during the 1930s. Both surnames were from marriages, as was Millicent Hunnings although frequent misspellings by arresting officers resulted in the latter sometimes spelt Hummings or Hunning. Millicent FARRELL (sic) is most likely the name on her birth certificate, though elsewhere it is spelt O’FARRELL. One hears in that sudden use of capital letters, a bureaucratic impatience with all those bloody names. In the 1940s, Kathleen/Millicent acquired a fifth surname, Tangga, fromher fourth marriage (no mean feat for a Roman Catholic), this time to a Malay. In my forthcoming novel, The Trap, this character will be named Millie Tangga. But my favourite of all her aliases is Dolores Carmelita Margarita Kathleen Millicent YOUNG: off she skips into florid Iberian fantasy gradually grinding down to a blunt Anglo monosyllable. Who knows what her ethnicity was? Who knows if she knew? She seems to have been born in south Sydney, in La Perouse or Malabar, an area that has maintained significant Aboriginal occupation all through colonisation til now.

As many know, at this time in Australia, Spanish names were commonly adopted by people of Indigenous heritage to escape persecution. Portuguese, Indian, Tahitian – any other darker-skinned race was deemed better than Australian Aboriginal. I have considered this when studying images of Kathleen McLennan aka Millie Tangga these long years. It is hard if not impossible to know her heritage from her mug shots.

Nom de plume, nom de guerre: hiding, secrecy, on the run. Aspirations, declarations, claims, denial. Sins of the father, stamped indelibly with his name. Forced to flee the mother country. Who are you really? Where are you from? But…originally?

My name is Thea Anamara Perkins. Mum chose Thea for Thea Proctor and Thea Astley. My middle name is from when I was born. It’s an Arrernte word, it’s a Dreaming and the name of a creek that flows northeast of Mparntwe (Alice Springs). I didn’t always show it but now it’s always there. I love the connection to culture and country it gives me: it’s just beautiful having our language as part of my name. My skin name is Kngwarreye, so when I’m in Alice people always call me that. I also love Anamara cos it’s about water and flowing; it’s not a public story so I can’t say more. I actually have a double-barrelled surname, like, it’s on all my documents – Perkins-Zabadin, from my grandfather who was Malaysian, but I choose to use Perkins cos it’s my mother who primarily raised me. That surname, Perkins, is from my grandfather’s mum, Hetti. She kept the name of her father. Her mother’s name was Nellie Araka and she was the first to straddle two worlds. I have a nickname – Spooky – but it’s a very intimate thing to call me. It’s just people in the family who can call me that. It’s cos I’m quite unusual even in my family, and I have really fair skin compared to my siblings. In high school I felt like an outsider, you know, a bit melancholic, introspective and sensitive. I wore lots of black. Spooky has grown with me and has become a nice point of connectivity.

It’s rarely possible to know whether you are a McGregor by blood. Clans were associated not only by biology but also by work and community, and in 1603, the King of England decreed that all versions of Clan Gregor be ‘altogidder abolished’ due to ‘barbarous and horrible’ deeds. Anyone bearing the name thenceforth would suffer the pain of death, the clan to be ‘exterminated and ruttid out’. The name was proscribed on and off for almost two hundred years – including during the lifetime of its most famous outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor – up until just after the invasion of so-called Australia. During the Jacobite uprisings, the McGregors were one of the Catholic clans who supported Prince Charles of the Stuart family, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, but ancient tribal disputes also accounted for those centuries of bloodshed and proscription. I did not know this when I drove up through the Scottish Highlands in the nineties, yet I found the uninhabited landscape so haunted.

Colonials love their battler myths. These myths do not contradict ascendence to the establishment so much as become intrinsic. My father loved London, Leicester Square and the English Common Law he practised at the same time as he loved his name from the clan considered the fiercest foes of the English in Scotland. He even arranged for bagpipes at his wedding to my mother in 1954. All my life, I’ve been greeted with bunged-on Scottish accents. Fun to attempt, impossible to pull off. On occasion, my father did it too. No relative would have had much of one: his grandfather was five when they immigrated in 1853. The patriarch, his great-grandfather Alexander McGregor, whose name has been handed down through all four generations since, had sailed ahead of his wife and nine children, and died in Deniliquin Working Men’s Hospital before his family landed in Sydney.

Further back, my ancestors would have been made to anglicise their names, but who knows when? Given the severity of the Cromwellian penal code, and that Gaelic was banned in schools from 1616, they might have stopped speaking their native tongues long before emigrating. Celtic culture was oral, and it’s said that until at least the eighteenth century, English was still not spoken above the Highland Line. In Ireland, English had been spoken since the twelfth century; there was only five per cent Irish land ownership by the time Australia was colonised. I have to Google the names my ancestors might once have carried. Baker – Báicéir. Meagher – O’Meachair. O’Sullivan – Ó Súilleabháin. Moloney – O Maoldhomnaigh. Kelly – O’Ceallaigh. And the spelling varies. My name is an Anglicisation.

In the seventeenth century, the O’Kellys, as my branch were then known, were kicked out of Galway during the decimation of the Irish land system. There are many stories of their battles for Ireland’s freedom, but one concerning a name change leaps out. The Falkirk letter was transcribed from a fireside story told by John Kelly in 1798 to his sons when they became excited at the prospect of another uprising. John cautioned them: their grandfather Colonel Patrick O’Kelly had been killed in the battle of Falkirk in 1746, after which orders were sent for the families of Irish Officers to be exterminated. The O’Kellys fled to the caves of Finvarra in Galway Bay.

‘There are several caves at Kinvarra,’ John said. ‘And all were occupied by refugee families who concealed the entrances so the marauder could not find them.’ But one day a young boy in a cave adjacent ‘looked out in curiosity. The Hessians [German auxiliaries to the British Army] swarmed up and butchered the family of nine persons. Luckily they missed our cave.

‘After seven years, we left our cave, dropped the “O” to our name for safety and went to live near Ennis.’ 

The Kellys were pursued for years, eventually settling in West Clare.

‘…When we came to Knocknahilla we pledged ourselves to be silent as to our blood. That is why I wish for peace for we are not strong enough to fight the Sassenagh [the English] but fire and sword will not always prevail and I feel that the day will yet come when the English will flee from Ireland.’

I’m certain neither of my parents knew that Gwen was cognate with Fiona. My mother was named after her aunt, Gwenda Eileen, whose grandparents were from Devon, a largely Celtic area. Her mother and aunt’s surname, Mann, is Germanic, used by English, Scottish, Irish, Ashkenazi Jews and Dutch. A more intriguing name in that branch of the family is de Courcey – a middle name for females only. Assumed to have originated from the eighth-century Norman incursions, my maternal grandmother Sheila inherited it from her Irish mother Amelia Molony and passed it to her eldest daughter. It skipped two generations but is now borne by my cousin Lola de Courcey Hannon-Tan.

Queers, with our logical families, are more likely to branch out in our reinventions.

My name is Kelly Dezart-Smith. Like most queer people, I spose my name is ever-evolving. The name I was born with, Kelly Jean Dezart Junior, was tied up with my father. My family is from Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. It’s a custom there for all the boys to have hyphenated first names starting with Jean, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, and all the girls have Marie as their hyphenated first name, like Marie-Denise. I don’t know the history behind the naming convention, maybe it’s to do with the missionaries. So yeah the way I pronounce it as an American, it sounds like the female name ‘Jean’ in the Anglosphere. Unusually, my father had Jean as his middle name and Kelly as his first, and he was the first to be named like that, so I was Junior. But as I grew I wanted to find out who I was. I use Kelly Lovemonster as my name for most art and nightlife things I do. It came to me in 2007 via my close friend Laura. She was in the Met and cried at the sight of a painting; she’d ingested some substances. She came home and someone said to her, You’re such a Lovemonster. Then she said to me, You’re a Lovemonster! We were sharing a house in Brunswick, New Jersey, you know, having parties and inviting people to take their clothes off and roll around in paint with us. My middle name is left out all the time: on one of my bank cards I’m just called KJ. Later, in 2012, I married my Australian husband Spencer Smith, and we decided to combine our surnames so we’re both Dezart-Smith. Spencer himself has had so many different names, including Spencer Spencer. He later took his mother’s surname, Smith. Funnily enough, back in the States lots of Black folks have the surname Smith, often times connected to the transatlantic slave trade! When Spence and I had our son, it was important to give him a gender-neutral name so we chose Alexis or Lexi. You know Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea? I love how in that book people have multiple names, and if you know someone’s true name, you have power over them. Their true name is their true self.

About one hundred years after James Macpherson published his Ossianic cycle featuring Fiona, a writer called Fiona Macleod appeared in print. She was supposedly from Iona, and in association with fin-de-siècle pagan revivalism, for a short time became the most famous proponent of Scottish Celtism. She corresponded copiously with journals, as well as literary figures such as W.B. Yeats, yet nobody ever met her in person. Speculation grew that Fiona Macleod was a pseudonym but the author insisted she was a real Highland writer.

In 1905 the truth came out when author William Sharp, another successful Celticist and neo-pagan, died. In a letter delivered to his closest friends, Sharp admitted he was Fiona Macleod. Born in Paisley, Sharp was a Lowlander and not a Gaelic speaker. Five years after his death, his wife Elizabeth published a biography of her late husband. Divided into two parts, the first titled William Sharp, the second Fiona Macleod, the book included many extracts from his/her correspondence. Trans academic Josie Giles describes the biography as ‘detailed and loving’, and not motivated by the need to explain a ‘deception’ but rather a tabling of different expressions of her husband’s soul-beyond-gender, which she names Wilfon. One extract reads –

When ‘she’ awoke to active consciousness ‘she’ became the deeper, the more impelling, the more essential factor. By reason of this severance, and of the acute conflict that at times resulted therefrom, the flaming of the dual life became so fierce that ‘Wilfon’ – as I named the inner and third Self that lay behind that dual expression – realised the imperativeness of gaining control over his two separated selves…

Yeats was one of the correspondents who intuited that Sharp and Macleod were facets of the one person. Sharp himself wrote, ‘I am tempted to believe I am half a woman’ and that Fiona Macleod was the expression of his ‘truest self’, bearing a ‘rapt sense of oneness with nature, this cosmic ecstasy and elation’. While there is no evidence that Sharp dressed or lived in any way as a woman of those times, Fiona Macleod was so real to William Sharp that he exchanged Christmas cards with her.

There’s a film in that.

With thanks to all who shared their name stories with me: Beuz Martino Barbella, Miki Cabrera Luna, George Khut, Jiva Parthipan, Susana vaz Nery, Thea Anamara Perkins, Kelly Dezart-Smith. With thanks also to John and Sue Hannon for the Kelly lore, and to McKenzie Wark for alerting me to Josie Giles’s work on Fiona Macleod.