I personally spent a while checking out baby-name sites, it took me a while to narrow it down to something I liked and identified with, that also clicked for other people.

I don't plan on a name change, but during the time when I considered it, my plans were to either use the masculine form of my birth name, which I like because it's slightly obscure, or else use the name my parents would have given me if I had been assigned male at birth, which is very different from my current name but which i still feel a connection to.

I am cis, but a lot of my friends picked names similar to their birth names. Something like changing Matthew into Maddie, Rocky to Roxanne, or something similar. I have one friend who had an incredibly supportive family and she took her grandmother's name. Others kinda play around with a few names they like until they find the one that suits his or her identity.

I have ONE friend, and I know this is totally rare, but she knew she was female when she was 7, and her parents went as far as picking a new name for her. She is 28 now and still goes by that name. It's what she grew up with and she says it fits her well

Semi-random

One of my friends changed her name to a name similar to one of her idols.

I identify as Genderqueer but when I used male names in the past, they came from nicknames I was given by friends. I've gone by Brett (which I believe is the masculine equivalent of my name) and by Rycki (Ricky) because it was a nickname given to me by my sister. If I were to use another male name, I would probably do so by raiding baby name sites until I found a name that suits me.

I have several trans friends, one of the which went through several names before he finally decided on one. The first one he chose was a variation on his (already androgynous) middle name. The next name he chose was a name I had mentioned was my favorite, and he also liked it. The following few names had been names he chose for characters he was writing about. The name he ended up legally changing it to was a variation of a name that he had always liked but the original name had been too biblical for his liking. His name change was legally approved a week ago

I chose the name I'd used for myself in my daydreams when I was a child. I don't remember why I chose it at that point, I just like it.

i based it off a nickname someone gave me, elaborated it and am very happy w/it.

As a GQ person, my name is perfect because it's unisex. I love my parents for picking that one for me ;D

I just always loved the name Vincent
before that thought I wanted my name to be Dante, then I decided Vincent was better suited for me.

I sat down for a few hours, went over every name I had used since I was 3 (starting with Jessica). I had then pooled in names I liked, some I heard and some I made up. I slowly crossed off what didn't feel right, what I thought didn't fit me. If a name gave me a mental image of something that wasn't me, I crossed it off. Eventually I came down to only 3 names, tried them out for a while, seeing how out thought I would feel being called that. Eventually I stuck with Selene, something nice and short, soft that flows easily off the tongue, also an easy nick-name as Sel.

I looked at baby name sites and happened across a male version of my first name, but my middle name is unisex in pronunciation so I just have to get the spelling changed

Raphael was my favorite Ninja Turtle :'P.

I changed my name 3 or 4 times before i settled to Thomas. I just searched name sites day and night seeing which ones i like, and i eventually went for the one i used as a kid, before i even came out as trans. Weird eh?

I knew I wanted to name myself after an angel, so I scoured for all the angel names I could find, and then named myself after one who was the bad guy in my favourite comic series. Much cooler than just picking 'Michael'.

Nobody really ever called me by my birth name but used the male version of my name as a sort of nick name. It wasn't a big jump when I had to legally change it. Unfortunately, I had a very supper feminine middle name that has no male equivalent so I just kept the initials the same and sat down with my mother to talk about what a good alternative would be.

The name I chose is a masculine form of a nickname I had as a kid, which was a shorter form of my birth name. It's semi-androgynous as at the time I identified as GQ, but still fits me now. For my middle names, I went with the name I would have been given, and my father's name.

My name was chosen based on things I find personal to me. From there I just narrowed it down to several names and tried each out for awhile, just calling myself that name. From there I used whichever name "stuck" the best.

When I was young I wanted to go by Logan because I really liked it (I was probably 14 or 15 at the time), before that I went by Kevin briefly (in middle school) because my mom told me if I'd been born a boy that would have been my name. When I got to college I started using Elliott because I dreamed it was my name. Now I just go by Jesse (which is sort of the "male" version of my birth name) because it's the only one that really felt like me. I ended up keeping Elliott as my middle name though.

I have a trans friend and he just chose a name he liked. But he wanted his mother to like the name as well, so he asked her opinion, which was very sweet.