By Jennifer Vanasco

My name is Jennifer.

But since high school, I’ve gone by “Jay.”

It’s been interesting to watch reactions to my nickname change over time.

When I was in high school and working at a bookstore (the bookstore that named me, actually, because there were too many Jennifers to keep track of), customers would sometimes point to my nametag, laughing a little.

“Wore the wrong tag today, eh?” they would say.

Or: “Who’s Jay, your boyfriend?”

Sometimes I would say, “Oh, Jay is short for Jennifer.” Many people did not like that at all. One woman, in response, kept repeating, “No, but that’s not a girl’s name. And you’re a girl.”

Sometimes I would just lie. “Oh, it’s short for Jason,” I’d say cheerily. “My parents wanted a boy.”

Younger people would give some variation of, “That’s cool.” Older people, especially women, would gasp in horror, clutching at my elbow in sympathy. I would roll my eyes at my colleagues, and they would laugh.

I liked my nickname. To me at the time, it signaled that I was different from other girls. Tough, despite my clearly feminine exterior. In my secret heart, I thought of it as giving me “boyish” qualities: heroism, strength, bravery.

It meant that I could be Luke Skywalker, the guy who swings himself across a metal gorge, instead of Leia, the girl who gives him a kiss for luck.

It’s sad to me now that I thought women couldn’t have those qualities, too, but at the time I thought all heroes, pirates, swashbucklers and explorers were men.

And I wanted to be a hero. So I wanted to be a boy. Well, OK, not a boy—I wasn’t even remotely tomboy-ish, unlike, it seems, the entire lesbian population—but I wanted a boy’s name.

In college, things were slightly different. On my diverse, women-only college campus in the early 1990s, women were solicitous, asking when they met me if Jay were spelled with an e on the end, “Jaye.”

“No,” I would say, and found that there were four responses: women who were perfectly accepting that this was just my name; women who asked what it was short for; women who thought it was thrillingly cool, because they, like me, thought girls with surprising boyish qualities were cool; and women who “knew” it meant I was a lesbian.

I am a lesbian, but didn’t know it through my first two years of college. In any case, my name doesn’t “mean” I’m a lesbian. It’s just my name.

Once I came out, though, I found an easy home for my name among other lesbians. “Jay” meant that I wasn’t like other femme-y straight girls, that I wasn’t trying to be Jennifer Lopez or Jennifer Aniston. I even met a few other “Jays,” who, like me, took their name because there were too many Jessicas or Jills where they came from.

In the past few years, though, reactions to my name have changed dramatically.

Now in the queer community, people—especially when they “meet” me over email—see the juxtaposition of my email address, which says “Jennifer” and my own sign-off, which says “Jay” and make a whole new set of conclusions.

A transgender woman I was corresponding with recently, for instance, asked delicately, “I read your column from time to time. Are you now going by ‘Jay’ rather than ‘Jennifer’…?”

I knew what she was actually asking, because I’ve been asked this bluntly before: “Does your name mean you’re transitioning?”

No. It doesn’t. But I can see why she would think it does—after all, we’ve entered a new time where masculine-looking women might not be butch but might instead be transgender or transitioning, and when men’s names on women’s bodies (even the bodies of feminine women) signify that a woman’s gender is not what it might appear to be.

Especially since she’s never met me, it would be easy for my correspondent to picture me as a man who was formerly a woman.

But I’m not a man. I’m a female born female and comfortable that way—especially since women’s roles continue to expand.

In contrast, our view of gender is still very narrow. So narrow that a girl who has a boy’s name has to explain herself over and over again.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. She blogs on politics daily at VisibleVote08.com; or read her personal blog and column archive at jennifervanasco.com. Write her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com.