Yes this. I've been following the Reclaim Her Name shitshow republishing writers like George Eliot under their given names and it's just the archetype of misguided terf-adjacent white feminism. I have several names, chosen and given, all "real" in different ways https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1294243366843031552

Names have been complicated and rich and weird for me as a trans 1.5-generation migrant writer. It's a beautiful irony that I've ended up choosing a version of my given name but there's not a single strand of buried authenticity there.

For years I used a Latinate feminine name that wasn't legibly Chinese. But it wasn't intended as whitening: I was primarily a performance poet then, so my face was always right there. As I shifted into writing for the page, I wanted a Chinese name again.

I also wanted a less feminine name, and to remember my ah-gong who named me. But a Chinese name in an a English sentence is always a compromise. And my birth name is, like most, structured by patriarchy.

The insistence that huaren must have Chinese names is patronising. It's more sinister in the context of the Chinese state asking foreign citizens who have Chinese ancestry to register Han Chinese names on visa applications. That's discrimination and often intimidation.

It's a rude denial of how naming works in the diaspora. As @arthur_affect says in his thread, a lot of people have "Chinese school" or "Hebrew school" names used only in that context. Or you only have a diminutive. My sister's Chinese name is Sprout, a corruption of Baby.

My girlfriend's Chinese surname is a sinicisation of the anglicisation of her patrilineal surname rather than her matrilineal Chinese surname. My mother has three Chinese names, one given at birth, one used by her southern relatives, one adopted during the Cultural Revolution