“Alright, time to put on the Kate Sloan costume,” I said out loud to my reflection the other night, as I prepared to go on a date with someone who knows me from the internet.
I’ve said this to myself a lot of times over the years, sometimes with delight, sometimes begrudgingly, and sometimes uncertain quite how I felt. But this week, it felt good. Like me. Like home.
An open secret I will share with you newsletter folks: Sloan is not my legal last name and never has been, although I adopted it nearly two decades ago and have consistently been known by that name by most of the people in my personal and professional life alike. I originally changed it for Internet security reasons, as an anxious little 14-year-old making her first Facebook profile – but then friends throughout high school would call me Sloany and K-Slo and sometimes just “Kate Sloan!” shouted in full across the cacophonous lobby of my high school, and the name already felt as much a part of me as my right arm.
So it made sense to keep the name when I started doing sex journalism – not only because I liked it and because it had been mine for years, but also because there is already a famous thinker in the sex-and-gender-writing space who shares my legal name, whose books I incidentally recommend to people all the time. (If you know, you know.) And so I became Kate Sloan pretty much everywhere except tax forms and the doctor’s office. Which, in itself, helped reinforce what I already knew to be true: I felt better, happier, most myself, as Kate Sloan.