I do admit, I’m actually quite glad that my name isn’t really Thesilée. So much to spell! And then there’s the accent – does it have to go to the left? Or to the right? And do you pronounce it? When I stood up in front of my friends around 1998 and said »I want you to call me Thesilée from now on!«, it was no wonder that they laughed at me. »That sounds like Teesieb (tea strainer)!« they said, and then the matter was off the table. I withdrew the application and remained Maja, and even though I’ve always regretted never having a nickname, and even though people always had to make bee jokes and sing that song by Karel Gott, it’s a name that I really like and under which I then published my books.
The fact that I became Thesilée in the second instance was due to misinformation. It was the fault of the acquaintance who took me to my first filk convention – and who told me that everyone at filk used a pseudonym. »Nobody knows what anyone else’s real name is,« he said, and I, expecting to join a secret society, chose the name that gave the least indication of what my real name was. And it was still a nice name.
In fact, there are many people in filk who are better known by their badge names than by their real ones, but there are still plenty who use their real names, and even among those who use nicknames, in most cases you know their real names – at the latest when you accept their Facebook friend requests. So I could have stayed Maja from the start. The fact that I didn’t is ultimately a stroke of luck. It allows me to separate music and writing. I already do so much under my real name that the name has to be able to recover from time to time.
That’s why I’ll always be Thesilée in the Filk. The name is unique, has recognition value and is pronounced correctly surprisingly often: even Americans, who never knew what to make of the spelling of Maja-with-a-J until I was used to reacting to everything that began with an M – Myrna, Moira, Mia – pronounce Thesilée correctly straight away – it’s the accent that makes you think »French!« and you’re there. Well, some people also make it Sse-ssi-lee, but I can live with that better than Myrna. So the correct pronunciation is TAY-see-LAY.
But now it gets a little more complicated. I’m non-binary, and I prefer masculine pronouns to feminine ones. This is difficult to implement with my real name, Maja sounds too feminine for that, but in the autumn of 2023 I put my money where my mouth is and asked for male pronouns to be used for me. Thesilée is a fantasy name and, as far as I’m concerned, can also be read as masculine despite the feminine ending in French. And if you just call me Thesi, you’re never doing anything wrong. I’ve already thought about switching completely to the short form – but that would also be a shame for the reputation I’ve built up as »the Bard Thesilée«, and the domain of this website is thesilee.de, and anyway, it’s still a nice name. So I’ll stick with Thesilée. But if you want to give me a treat, it’s he/him.
Thanks for listening! Such a long digression for a not-so-long name! But now you know.