My name is Aaron. It’s not particularly Arab sounding, even though I am 100% sings-Amr-Diab-in-the-shower-Arab. If it helps, my full name is Aaron Rafik Abdel-Aziz El Sabrout, which I think balances the scales a little bit.

When I was 6, I realized that Aaron Carter’s first name wasn’t too different from mine. When I was 14 and my identity was changing frighteningly fast, I chose that name because it felt comfortable and familiar, the small linguistic warp from my legal name to “Aaron” making me feel like I wasn’t truly changing who I was so much as retooling what I had to better fit me.

Back then I didn’t really think about what my name meant, culturally or etymologically. It was just a way to stop hating myself and my name. Plus, “Aaron” is a useful name because when written down it’s clearly a male name, but when said out loud it sounds exactly the same as “Erin,” preserving a sort of gender neutrality. Even though I hate getting back Starbucks cups with “Erin” on them, it’s a matter of safety for me to not be immediately outed as trans as soon as I meet someone.

I mean, what’s in a name, anyway? Carrying on the pre-Islamic tradition of the Arab nomad as poet, we Arabs are obsessed with words. The first words of the Qur’an are an imperative to read. The miracle of the Qur’an is in its poetics, its ease of memorization, of its perfect linguistic preservation. Arabic is all about preserving words–it’s why you’re not allowed to call translations of the Qur’an the real thing, it’s why our names are dizzyingly long strings of patronymics, tracing genealogies back for centuries. The name I gave at the beginning of this article is only about half of the length that I know; we memorize our names like we memorize the Qur’an, like Pi, stretching out into infinity, trying to see if we can go back a digit further, a name further. I do not speak to my father’s family any more, but I honor my ancestors by keeping their names in my head.

So where does my name fit in? Will I someday have children, adding my name to the front of that long procession of failed fathers? Or maybe I’ll be kind and give my children normal middle names. Growing up in Southern California, that was always the question: “what’s your middle name?” It felt like a betrayal to say I didn’t have one, but my father betrayed me first.