Story Behind My New Name: Chandler Haviland

When the Trans Checklist Narrative Needs More Room

I’ve had my new name since the late fall of 2020. I’ve held it close. I’ve asked myself questions about what renaming meant to me, what community I wanted around the process, if it mattered. Also it was COVID, and I moved, and my sense of identity and communities were shifting. The best way for me was just to let all of that be. Do I just post it to Facebook and be done with it? My answer to that was no. My unfolding & how people refer to me right now is what I’m calling the “murky middle.” Some people know, some people don’t. I’ve been cautious with being a teacher right now & doing some other public-facing work, so those political dynamics have played a role in the unraveling of this timeline as well.

There’s some joy in the slowness though. My new name involves a few stories—stories that I want people to know. I want people to know why I chose this name for myself. I want the conversation to open up—do we know the stories behind our names? How do our names tether us to our lineages? What is our relationship to lineage work? What grief is there? What joy? What reclaiming opportunities may exist? I want these questions to slow all of us down & invite us into deeper connection with ourselves and one another. I also actually love my name: Alyssa, the name my parents gave me. I honor all trans people who feel a sense of dysphoria around their names—that just hasn’t been true for me. In some ways I’m not in a rush. As someone who has not been in contact with their parents since I started medically transitioning—my name tethers me to my parents & holds a particular kind of connection, a particular grief & honoring. Plus—I went by “Lyss” from the time I was a kid through undergrad, which has always felt very gender neutral to me. My sister still calls me Lyss & we both love that!

When I moved to SW Michigan in 2020, I spent some time getting to know the history of the region. I also had been involved in white caucus work for a time, and was archiving & researching some white anti-racist ancestors. I was curious about the Underground Railroad route throughout Michigan, often moving through the small towns of what is now mostly very conservative Trump Country. As I was compiling this information these 2 stories fascinated me: the stories of Elizabeth Chandler & Laura Haviland. Imperfect white women. Quakers, although Laura Haviland struggled with that identification throughout her life. Raised within middle/upper middle class views of abolition in New York & Pennsylvania before settling in Southeast Michigan in 1829. There’s still a white Christian “expansionist” narrative that must be dealt with.

I didn’t realize to what extent moving back to Michigan would be reckoning with the white rural-ness in which I grew up. I needed to return to the land and its memories. Not separate myself from it, also not just look back on it with nostalgia as in the “quieter, simpler life.” Stacy Jane Grover, writes an essay in her book Tar Hollow Trans entitled “A Roof, And Bed, And Board” which is her processing her connections to her rural landscape, including her connection to barns in southeastern Ohio—but how she has to reckon with history too. She states, “Colonial settlers must turn the land and the people on it into resources to be harnessed. The first step is to eliminate Indigenous peoples from the land in a variety of ways, from outright genocide, to removal and confinement in reservations outside of the ever-changing boundaries of white settlements. Assimilation and landowner acts are interlocking steps.”

As I dug into the stories of Laura Haviland and Elizabeth Chandler—I loved their friendship. Together they formed the Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society that lasted two years until Elizabeth Chandler died of remittant fever at the age of 27. Chandler left behind hundreds of anti-slavery poems, writing she dedicated herself to. Laura Haviland was a teacher, having established the first integrated school in Michigan, and worked for years on the Underground Railroad. There were these themes of writer, teacher, illness, risk-taking. As I kept reading & learning, I knew that I wanted to live into their legacy, & grapple with their contradictions.

I took both of their last names, for a gender neutral affect—as my first & middle name: Chandler Haviland. I’m keeping Storrs as my last name.

In December of 2021, I visited the Lenawee County Historical Society museum detailing the life and work of Chandler and Haviland. I also visited their graves. In October of 2022, I held a renaming ceremony with dear beloveds at a local park in Westfield, Indiana (which was a key part of the Underground Railroad). This spring in Geez magazine, a short story I wrote was published, describing my renaming ceremony.

So much of the trans narrative is around dysphoria, and the steps taken to eliminate dysphoria whether through hormones and surgery, name changes & whatever else feels good to socially transition. I’m not knocking these things, as my story contains these as well. However, there’s such pressure that it follows a certain order & timeline. That hasn’t been my experience, and I don’t expect it will continue very linearly—most of life isn’t like that anyway.

Name changes take some getting used to! (For me too!) So I’ll be patient with you, as you are patient with me. The cost & time it takes to change names on all the documents and email signatures, etc is definitely a thing. And I’m being gentle with myself and taking it one step at a time. And if there’s a delay, or you see my name as Alyssa in some things, consider that it may be for legal/protective reasons. I’m not going to find a need to explain/justify myself. I’m here for accepting the multitudes within you, the multitudes within me. May it be so!