The Names in Me by Mateo Acuña

If I had been born a cisgender boy, I would have been named Walter, after my father and grandfather. My cousin once removed, cousin twice removed, and my father’s cousin twice removed are also named Walter. It had always been peculiar to me that the whitest white name, and often the moniker of movie villains—something you notice when half of your relatives have it—was a family name for a bunch of brown Peruvians.

I asked my grandfather from the other side of the equator, using the modern wonders of WhatsApp and Google Translate, where the family name came from. According to him, the name came from his father, Alberto, who worked at a German company as a naval mechanic. While he was there, he became friends with a German man named Walter. He liked the name and gave it to his son, who then gave it to his son. Other men in the family liked and passed the name down to their sons. Maybe God did know what he was doing when he made me trans.

Curiously, the meaning of Walter, “ruler of the army,” is close to the meaning of the name that was given to me instead, Aubrey, which means “elf ruler” or “ruler of the little people.” My mother was the one who chose it for me, and often said it was fitting because of how I led games to entertain my two younger siblings. As an aspiring fantasy author, I dreamed about how satisfying the name would look printed on the book about fairies I was writing. Together, my full name—Aubrey Acuña—was a visual alliteration but sonically misaligned.

Ever since I was young, I hated the way Aubrey sounded. If the u is flipped upside down, the letters can be rearranged into Barney, the victim of many a schoolyard song parody and a purple dinosaur of my personal derision. Aubrey was a difficult name for my Peruvian grandparents, too. My abuela pronounced it “Ah-brri,” and my abuelo “Oh-brree.” And it was constantly being conflated with Audrey, the prettier and older Hepburn sister to the weird and awkward Aubrey Plaza.

In college, when I was ready to come out as transgender, I knew I wanted to take the opportunity to change my name. I looked up trans guy names, nonbinary names, Latino names, mythological names, boy names stemming from the same root as Aubrey—Alberich—but however cool they were, none of them felt like me. I began to question if I would find a name that suited me at all. And what was I, without a name?

During the process, I sat down with my mother in her living room and asked if she had ever picked out a boy name for me, because no way was I naming myself after the founder of Disney, or a slimy husband taking credit for his wife’s paintings, or a chemistry teacher turned meth cook. But my mother hadn’t had any boy names in mind for me. After a few minutes of internet research, she said of my transmasculine younger brother, “If we had thought Grey was a boy, we would have named him Mateo.”

“Mateo,” I said, trying out how it felt in my mouth. I liked the “Ma” at the beginning, like the sound of a kiss, the sizzle of the “T” in the middle, and the warm “O” at the end. The name means “gift of god,” nothing interesting, but there is a peace in the way it sounds, in the harmonious mix of consonants and vowels. “I like that. I want to go by Mateo.”

As I used the name Mateo more, I questioned my decision. Growing up lightly toasted with an Anglo-Saxon name, classmates and adults would ask me, “what’s your ethnicity?” or the inhumane sounding, “what are you?” By choosing Mateo, I was giving the public an answer I didn’t owe them. But then I realized that my choice had nothing to do with others’ perceptions of me, but my self-perception. Mateo encapsulates my Latino heritage as the first born American citizen of a Peruvian immigrant, but it’s also a name no one else in my family has.

Had I been raised in Peru, I wouldn’t have had the luxury of social and medical transition. The fear of violence alone would be a big deterrent, not to mention the many legal obstacles and the scarcity of accessible, knowledgeable doctors. Transgender men in Lima reported “a lack of awareness and information among medical providers, avoidance of healthcare due to discrimination and maltreatment, an absence of public services for medical gender affirmation (hormones, surgeries), unmet mental health needs… and violence, stigma, and intersecting forms of oppression.”

I have a friend my age who lives in Peru. They are queer and closeted. In another life, that would have been me.

Because my father settled in Western Washington to receive support from his uncle, who moved there to marry a Mormon missionary, I can thank Mormonism for my access to trans-affirming healthcare, and my father for giving me some part of the elusive American dream: the power to choose my own name.