Is it Bianca or Blanca?

By Blanca Alfani

Well hello again! So you decided to return? really? Ok, this is totally on you now. I will assume I did such a good job with my first posts that you were anxiously waiting for the next one. Wait no more then, here it is.

So I decided for this post to talk about my female name selection. Is it Blanca and I’m just so clumsy I misspell it? Well let me tell you, I am clumsy but no, that’s not a typo. It is not Bianca with a capital “i” is Blanca with a lowercase “L”. Whaaaaaaa!!!? Well I don’t think it’s much of a shocker really specially to Spanish speaking people. It is a fairly common name in Latin America. In case you are not familiar with the word, it means “White”. So for example the classic character Snow White in Spanish is known as “Blanca Nieves” Nieve as you may already figured out it’s Snow.

Ok so you might be thinking I got my name after Snow White, how original a Disney princess. Well actually no. She’s not even in my top 5 princesses. Which ones are they you ask?

  1. Ariel
  2. Rapunzel (the tangled version)
  3. Belle
  4. Elsa
  5. Merida

There, now continuing with my story, why then Blanca? You know what, the name is not even in my top 5 female names. Which ones are they you ask? I’m kidding it was actually my second choice, besides I’m not going to do that all over again. You wanna know my number one choice? The name I have always wanted, my absolute favorite without a doubt since I was a little kid is… Monica. Although there was a brief period of time when I preferred Monique, just to fancy it up a little more, French does that to a lot of words.


Ok so I still haven’t answered why I went with Blanca  specially if Monica or Monique were my dream names since childhood. Well it’s very simple. One of the things out of a whole bunch of questions that my wife asked me after I came out to her was… How are we going to refer to your female self? Can you guess what name jumped out of my mouth right away? Yeah, Monica! I was expecting an okay Monica it is then, or yeah I like it too. But what I got instead was the equivalent to the expression of someone looking at a mouldy piece of cheese in the fridge.


Not that she had anything against the name nor that she thought it was an ugly one either, she just said it wasn’t a name she thought fitted me. It was a devastating blow, Monica had been with me pretty much my whole life up to that point, and just like that, like a mouldy cheese, she was now in the trash. After a brief mourning, I rapid fired a few other options thinking my mistake had been taking that one out first and giving her enough time to think about it. Blanca was amongst those names that came after, and contrary to her reaction to Monica, her face lighted up at the sound of it. Bingo! We had a winner.


So yeah, basically my wife chose my name. And you might be thinking, ok but it’s your name, your choice not hers and you might be right, but I love my wife profoundly and I respect and value her and her opinions and advice immensely. Besides, I had just recently come out to her, she was still processing the shocking revelation, was I really going to have an argument with her about a name? if she preferred to live with Blanca instead of Monica, hey I was more than fine with that. I mean is not like she forced it on me either, she said I like that one if you like it too. And on the other hand, I can’t find a good reason to stick to Monica. I have no clue as to why I like that name in the first place. I never met a Monica, I never had a friend or girlfriend named Monica, not a single relative of mine has that name either, so, why? Why do I like it so much? I dunno. I just do for whatever reason or more precisely for no reason at all. So not having a good enough one to fight for it made it a lot easier to accept and adopt Blanca instead.


That leaves me with explaining the Alfani surname. Once we gave Blanca her “oficial” birth name, I thought she couldn’t be just Blanca. What if an old lady came up to me one day while at the desert and asked me who are you? I would respond, I’m Blanca and she would ask back, Blanca who? (Yes I did it again, Star Wars, Episode IX to be exact for those not familiar) Well I wish I could tell you another long story about that too, but unfortunately I don’t have one. I just started looking around for a surname that would sound good with my newly adopted name and that’s how after looking for a while I came across Alfani, Italian roots, sounded cool and from another interesting language.


And that’s the story about how I came to be Blanca Alfani. Oh wait a second, I just realized this post wasn’t about that. Oh well, now you know is Blanca and not Bianca which I want to point out is also a lovely name. So I don’t mind being mistakenly named. (Inspired by a true story ;)


“And that’s all I have to say about that” (Gump 1994)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts

By Blanca Alfani
Image
As Obi-Wan would say… Hello there! (Yes a Star Wars fan, not a “Star Wars FAN”, but yeah) Well, as the title implies, this blog is going to be about my thoughts, the thoughts of an ordinary Trans Woman. So let’s get a couple of things straight right away first, or maybe more than a couple. First, who am I? Well I will not go into a lot of detail about me at this very moment, but perhaps I’ll share a little more with each post. But for now, I’m Blanca Alfani, a graphic designer and I identify as a Trans Woman but I haven’t made any kind of transition, social, legal or medical. I live full-time as my male self and Blanca expresses fully at home every once in awhile. What I mean is she finds her way out even when presenting as male. I underdress all the time, there has been only cute panties in my drawer for years now, along with other items such as bralettes or pantyhose’s I sleep in nightgowns and wear women footwear at home. I even wear a very light layer of makeup daily. But a full fe...
Read more

Expectations

By Blanca Alfani
Recently my friend Hannah posted an interesting article, “ Rated X for unrealistic expectations ” . In it she addresses a few issues from an interesting perspective, I get her point on how porn can influence or distort our expectations (or reality). I’m not going to lie and say I have never ever seen porn. I have come across it a few times during my life, what is also true though is that I have never paid for it nor consume it regularly. Every time I encounter it was purely unintentional.   Now did porn changed or distorted my expectations about how my wife would react to me coming out to her? Well no, because I’m talking about my teen years way before I even met her. What it did do for me, was to reinforce my desire to be a woman, how could it not if they looked like they were the ones enjoying it the most. but anyway I’m not going into that subject, what I actually want is to touch on a couple of paragraphs in her article about our partners. It is very true we usually have unreal...
Read more