I am cis, but my given name was very aged for my generation and grandmotherly which made me self-conscious as a kid.

When I decided to ditch my name, first I tried using my middle name, but that starts with a different letter and it turns out my brain tunes that out entirely if someone that I wasn't already listening to calls it out. I had to already be engaged in conversation with someone to respond to it, which doesn't work great if someone across the room calls out your name to try to show you something cool. My parents never did the full name scolding so I literally almost never have heard my middle name spoken aloud. My dad even thought I had my deceased sister's middle name the last time I can remember middle names coming up in discussion.

I gave up on the name change for a couple of years, but in high school I decided to give something else a shot. I started using my first initial, but spelled phonetically, for example: K spelled as Kay or L as Elle. That was the solution I needed. If someone shouts it from across the room, my brain alerts just like with my full first name. It's simple, but it works. I've stuck with it for 23 years now.

I highly recommend picking something that has a starting sound similar to your current name so your subconscious brain will still pick up on it, otherwise your friends and family will be shouting your new name over and over to get your attention while you are completely oblivious. My kid is trans and I am going through this now from the opposite end of calling the new name out repeatedly with no response because he also picked a name with no similarity to his given name.

Just thought about different names and the one I later chose somehow just felt good

I really wanted a name that starts with the letter 'M' because it just felt right. I then looked up "nonbinary/genderneutral names that start with the letter M" I found one with a slight association with my deadname

I used to play a ton of online RPGs with a strong focus on actually roleplaying and I pretended I was a girl named Alia. So I'm kind of surprised I never considered that name when I actually came out. In my 20s I started hanging out with an older transwoman who was kind of like my mentor, and she named me Shauna. I ended up back in the closet for about 15 years, but when my egg cracked again a couple of years ago I floated a few options to my partner which the same first initial as my deadname, and she didn't like any of them except Shauna, and to be honest I also liked Shauna the best.

My friend suggested and I liked it :3

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved the video game series Thief, where curse words are often replaced with the word taffer. I chose it as my username, but then it stuck as my actual name when I later came out. Most people just assume I'm related to the guy from Bar Rescue and not that I'm a big fan of a stealth game from the 90s

Not trans but more genderfluid I guess. I have this alter ego and I got her name by finding the closest conventional name to my online nickname. And the full name version is hella cute which helps me to feel more fem. Anna and Annabelle.

I had a little Lalafell boy in FFXIV named Cocozan Cozan.

When I switched to femroe I changed the last name, truncated the first to Coco.

People knew me as Coco and she/her online and it felt right. Decided to keep the name for myself.

I looked for astronomy-related names, and ended up choosing the name of an asteroid ((2) Pallas)

I wanted my first name to be something easy for my family to adjust to, and chose my middle name because it spoke to me. Now I've learned my middle name is a family name, and my family and all my friends call me by my middle name, so my first name is relegated to official business only. It is a convenient way to identify scams very quickly :)

They're all derivative names. My first/middle names are gender-neutral, though I use the original spelling (which implies masc).

I won't go into detail since it's generally not a good idea to share full names on the internet with strangers, but when I was a kid I looked up my birthname, and the meaning of my first name was "the (opposing) version of [Name]" (eg "Francine is the feminine of Frank").

The irony of the original name was that its meaning was 'very gender' (eg: if Frank were to mean "buff and hairy"), so it was confusing if the opposing version's meaning changed in any way. I took a shine to it when I was a kid, then I used the original name and its most common spelling as my new first name as an adult.

I had a character in a story I wrote but never published that I've gone back to several times, originally named Sol for some in-universe reasons but I eventually changed it for other reasons. (Sorry for being vague, it wasn't a great story.) I still liked the name Sol, though, and eventually decided that I wanted to adopt it. I ended up going with Soleil (pronounced So-lay) because I like how it sounds.

My name (Diamond) mostly came from my username. I used to be more active talking on Discord, so a lot of my friends would call me based on my username. It was weird at first, but I got used to it! Some people found it surprising, but the reactions aren't too bad.

I've read it somewhere and it stuck a chord in me. I started to recognize it everywhere and it just slowly dawned on me that it's my name is guess 😅

I mostly just had some rules for names I wanted to avoid: names of people I knew personally, names that sound weird/unusual in english or swedish (where I'm from).

I considered a bunch of names via the usual methods like baby name lists and random name generators but didn't find one that felt right for me, until one day one just occured to me

I made a list of names I've always liked and found I kept coming back to one in particular, so that had to be it.

I read it in a bad sci fi book when I was about 14, and it just stuck in my head until I finally came out. Also I like trees and gin.