Oh, I love this post...this is something that I've always thought about but never really talked about with anyone. I always personally love gender neutral names, names that don't have a definition of being either male or female. Alex, Elliot, Dale, Jaime, Riley, Teagan...there's many many more, but those names come to mind because I have family member or friends with the names and have known people both male and female that share some of these names.

I agree, it would be great if, for example if Allie could be both a girl or boy name, and Stevie could be both a girl and boy name. I know it might sound weird to some at first, but I think this is only because we are not used to seeing girls named "Stevie" and boys named "Allie"...but what if all of a sudden there were girls named Stevie and boys names Allie? Would our ideas of these names change? I bet they would!...Challenging gender roles and norms means thinking outside of the box and rethinking our perceptions of certain societal norms. I think rethinking our notions of traditional male and female names would be a great thing.

As an aside, I think I'm horrified that the preschool teacher put little boys on blue nametags and little girls on pink ones to begin with.

This is an issue for me, too, although rather more subtly--my name is Alexius, which is always assumed to be a woman's name, but is in fact male-gendered (such as Cassius, Julius, et cetera). My mom always gets defensive whenever I remind her of that, even though I like my name and try to convince her that it doesn't matter to me that it's technically a masculine name. Sometimes when people tell me I have a pretty name I'll reply with "Thanks! Actually it's a masculine name though," and then they tend to go silent and look apologetic even though I'm clearly not upset by it at all and in fact enjoy it immensely. Ultimately I prefer having a name like Alexius; when I call myself by it I feel both that it's a pretty and a powerful name to have.

Be that as it may, you'll realize that it is far more common to have women with male/ambigious sounding names, rather than men with female sounding names. For example, while the chances of meeting a woman with the name of Alex, or Corey, is still quite high, you'd be hard pressed to find a man named Jennifer, Alice or Sonia. The former, while it may seem novel now and again, seems more acceptable to us than the latter.

There was a chapter in Freakonomics that dealt wih this. It detailed how, over time, more and more women took up what were historically male names, but that the reverse did not happen, ie. men did not seem to be taking up what were historically women's names. This trend is continuing until today, such that men have a smaller and smaller pool of names with which they are given.

I discovered in anthropology lectures that Inupiat (inuit) culture have completely non-gendered names. I think that's cool.

Drahill,
I love your thoughts on names. I love unusual names, and I'm glad my parents gave me something that wasn't popular at the time I was named.

As a teacher, though, I see the other side of it. It can be embarrassing. In my grade book I write M or F next to names that I'm not sure about. That way, I don't look for a male Alex or Devin when I need to look for a female one. This year I called a parent, "Jay," Mr. when it should have been Ms. in an email. (I'm SO careful about parent's last names and Mr./Mrs./Ms.)

By high school (where I teach), kids with unusual names usually know the deal by then. I would recommend making a mark when registering for school (M or F). I would recommend for teachers to print out the gender of their students with the class lists.

I would like some suggestions on how to handle a trans student. I have not had any who are open about it... and in my district, LGBTQ issues have been a hotbutton this year.

I find names and their history fascinating.

Giving girls boys' names is not new and is extremely popular at the moment, especially in America.
The 5th most popular girls name in 2007 in the USA was Madison, a male name meaning 'son of Maud'. Of the top 100 girls' names 18 of them were originally male names.

I think the sexism is more in the way it's justified as 'cute' or 'strong' to give a girl a boy's name but people would be horrified if you gave a boy a girl's name.
If you want to be different call a boy Ashley or Aubrey before they go the way of Shelley and Lindsay.

I have a crush on a guy whose name is Erin. Not Aaron, Erin. When I told my mom about this, her reaction was (of course) "But that's a girl's name!"

Then again, when I told her that he likes to bake, she asked if he was gay . . . sheesh.

With my name, it may not seem like any confusion could arise from people, but quite often it happens.

In writing, my name is clearly 'feminine', D-a-w-n; but phonetically the bulk of people hear D-o-n. A few things happen here when someone meets me and has commentary on my name: 1)"I had a [teacher, uncle, boss, etc] with that name, I'm surprised someone like you has such a masculine name!" 2)"D-o-n, right?" 3)"Is that short for Donna?"

It's hard not to express my frustration with these people, why is my name so hard to be imagined as the sunrise spelling and not a mistake of my parents? I know it's not so common for my generation (believe me, I've actually never met anyone younger than 35 with my name), but it's a known name! When I correct people on the spelling, they tend to ask of it's the feminine version of Don or Donald... "No", I say... "Actually 'Dawn' has been around centuries longer than Donald and originates from a different country, they just sound similar."

It's amazing to me that people are baffled that a feminine name with similar phonetics to another isn't a derivative of the masculine name.

Rosella, my dad's name is Ashley, and he's gotten quite a few perplexed looks in his lifetime, so it does goes both ways.

One of the things I find fascinating about boys; names now is that there is now sort of a "railing against" of what I've heard described as "soft" boys' names. A lot of popular boys' names today are very old, like Tristan, Declan, and the like. I sort of think this is due in part to the fact that there seem to be a lot of boy names out there than girls' names, which seem to be given more leeway. But you seem to assume that my post was talking about women who have male names exclusively. I think the post was pretty clear that parents of children (regardless of gender) should be allowed to name their children as they see fit.

Also, names and their gender assignments vary across cultures. My male cousin, who is German, has the name Jan (German pronounciation is Yan). I can tell you when people first meet him, many are expecting a woman. But that only happens in this country, whereas in Germany, the name is accepted as male. So it depends on where you happen to be. In England, naming a boy Lindsey or Ashley wouldn't be subversive at all or unusual, whereas here, it would be. When I wrote this piece, I was coming from the American viewpoint, though other ethnicities and nationalities probably have their own gendered names as well.

As far as teachers go, yeah, there will be times when confusion may happen. As far as I go (and I have a name that I have always considered female, but some don't), I think the best thing teachers can do would be to make an effort to make their classrooms as un-gendered as possible. Yeah, I think the idea of different color name tags or separate toys and the like are bad ideas overall. When I have come across a name of a person where I truly cannot be sure of the gender, sometimes I find it best to simply as the person what they like to be addressed as (and it usually makes them feel better). When it happens that I make a mistake in addressing someone's gender, I apologize, and usually, that remedies the situation (and most people who this happens to understand that their name may be androgynous and will accept the apology). These may not work work for everyone, it's just what I learned to do.

An aside, I've also noticed that often, an androgynous or masculine name will get "feminized" by changing the spelling, like with my name (that is consider to be very feminine). My name is Adrian (spelled that way) to honor one of my Greek relatives. I have been told many times that I have the "boy's spelling" and the girl's spelling is "Adrianne," even tho no such spelling exists in the Greek and "Adrian" itself is considered by the Greeks to fit either gender. Ugh.

My name is Aubrey, which is such an uncommon name in the US that nobody even considers that it's traditionally a man's name. I really love my name, and the fact that it can be used for either gender is a plus.

I've always thought of my name as non-gendered but as a lot of people assume it is gendered feminine. It's an unusual name - I've met two other people (one male, one female) with the same name in my whole life and heard of about two more (both female) who were friends of friends of friends. (It's rare enough that I don't want to say what it is because I want to retain some degree of anonymity here.) But I think unusual names tend to have a greater amount of flexibility.

That said, if I ever had a girl, I would name her Anne after my grandmother. A boy named 'Anne' would get way too much harassment over it - like "A Boy Named Sue"! As much as I love the idea of removing the gender from names, I also wouldn't want to subject my kid to that kind of harassment.

1 - I remember when I was in High School there was a male student named Ashley, which is originally a boy's name. We had a new principal (maybe his second year) who was presiding over the National Honor Society Awards. Ashley won the top award of something or other, and the principal was going over his general "resume" lauding him in front of the gathered students and parents... except he kept saying "she". We all felt so embarrassed that our principal didn't even bother to find out that this great student was not "she".

2 - On another note, I have two friends, one male, one female who have the same originally male but now almost exclusively female name (he's the first dude I ever met with it). To keep them straight in conversation, we added suffixes to their names -tonio for the male and -ette for the female. This is simply because we got tired of saying "I went out with X last night" and then having to amend it with a last name or a gender.

I don't think people will ever get over gendered names. I work at a baby superstore, and I see it everyday, not so much with names, but with how people color-code their babies. Once, I had a male customer buying gifts from a registry for a friend's girlfriend, and he actually called his friend to verify that it was the right registry because he didn't understand why there were so many "boy" items, when he knew they were having a girl. When I rang up his items, I saw that she had registered for a lot of yellows, greens, light blues and soft browns, cute striped and polka dot patterns, frogs, bumblebees... when I get customers like this (which I do every day), I want to ask them what is so inherently male (or female) about certain colors that makes them unacceptable for the other sex, but I have a feeling my bosses wouldn't like that.

Great post, always thought about that conundrum. And the idea of pink/blue for female/male stems back from when we're born [in a hospital] and we're dressed in pink or blue booties, hat and blanket to denote female or male, respectively.

As for me, I was named after Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind, and while I'm female and Ashley is a stereotypically "female" name, it's interesting that, nonetheless, I was named after a male. I love it. =)

This topic has my name all over it. (Uh, no pun intended) I remember attending a dinner where my mom was among the guests of honor for her contributions to her workplace (and the community - she's a social worker). Anyway, her boss was reading from cue cards and talked a bit about how awesome she was to be raising "her three boys, Darren, Joshua, and Michal" by herself. He blushed quite a bit when he met me later on.

Heh, I do encounter people often trying to "feminize" or soften my name by giving me nicknames like Mimi, Mikey, or Mish. (I find it funny how how presumptuous some people can be to take those kinds of liberties) But I just call myself Mike, and so do most people - and if they don't, I correct them.

Actually, this is one of my pet peeves. It's always the girl who gets the boy name. Rarely will you see a boy named, say, Sophia or Mary or Elizabeth. What's going on is devaluing the female names. They're seen as less desirable. Sounds pretty sexist to me.

So if someone's claiming to be gender-neutral by naming their daughter, say, James, they had better be just as OK with naming their son Hannah.

So many names that we think of as "girl's names" are actually just gender neutral names that are currently out of favour for boys (in North America at least). For example: Andrea, Lindsey, Joan, Kelly, Leslie, Alice, Val, Ivy, Stacey, Ariel, Ann, Carol, Ashley, Avery, Beverly, Loren, Susan, Courtney, Hilary, Gail, Laverne, Kimberly, Jane, Judy, Lonnie, Mandy, Marion, Whitney... all perfectly acceptable names for boys in the last century, and the list goes on.

Names go out of fashion, but they come back in fashion too, and I think we over-estimate the social damage done by having an unusual name. I grew up with a male Kimberly, Stacy, Carol, and Leslie - none of them seem the worse the wear for it. We just need to stop worrying about somehow damaging boys by giving them "girly" names, because really the gender neutral or "manly" name you gave them when they were born could be considered a girl's name by the time they're 20 anyway (my great uncle Beverly can vouch for that).

Two fun resources for checking out the popularity of names between the genders:

* The Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager

* The U.S. Social Security Administration Baby Names page

Who knew that in the 1890s Mary and Carole were as popular as Andy as a boy's name? In fact, Mary didn't fall off the top 1000 names for boys in the United States until the 1970s.

Feminist discussion aside, Wren, Corey and Wesley are going to have hard times due to their stupid names. Parents shouldn't give their kids odd names if they cared about what their child would have to go through for them.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that pink used to be the "masculine" color (because it deviates from red, which is considered the "manliest" of colors), and light blue used to be the "feminine" color (because it was considered a more demure and delicate color). It wasn't until the 1940s that the two colors somehow became inverted.
It's amazing to me how ingrained the association between pink and "girly" has become in our society in such a short amount of time. Most of us see pink and immediately think of little girls and princesses.

My given name is Michelle, but I was named after a male hockey player, Michel. My parents decided to feminize it to make life easier for me, apparently forgetting that the Beatles' song "Michelle" predated my birth by only a year or so.

In high school, because there were so many Michelle's a friend of mine started calling me Mickey because she got tired of yelling "Michelle" and having four to eight people turn around.

You would not believe how many times I get, "Mickey? Don't you mean Nikki? Mickey is a boy's name." Particularly the way I spell it. I had a room-mate who used to "cute" it up, "Miquee," to make it more girly. Sigh.

Yeah I have a similar problem. My name is Charly. It is not short for anything. Just Charly (This is how I've been introducing myself for the past 10 years...so that the question "Is that short for Charlotte? Charlene?" can't even exit someone's mouth). Granted, the spelling sometimes clues people in that I may be a girl, but more often than not people are surprised when I walk through the door. After their initial shock, people tend to like my name...even giving me the nickname "Charles".

I've always liked my name. I will say that it gets a little awkward when someone calls out "Charlie!" and a little boy and I turn around at the same time...or when I dated a guy also named "Charlie" (Just Charlie...not Charles...). But it fits me and I wouldn't change it for anything.

Oh HALLELUJIHA!!(or however it's spelled)

This doesn't have to do with names, but gender "norms" and such...

When I was pregnant with my second son, I gave my first born son a baby doll. I got all sorts of crap from people etc...why? Because BOYS don't get baby dolls!!!

Why did I give him a baby doll? Because I wanted him to learn how to hold a baby and how to be gentle.

When I gave my second son a baby doll when I became pregnant with my third son, my father inlaw flipped out!!

But when my husband explained WHY I gave him a baby doll, he saw the logic and the reasoning.

Although my husband is a feminist, he still wants his sons to adhere to gender specific roles. He doesn't want his sons to wear angel costumes or other "girl leaning" costumes at Christmas.

This bugs me because quite a few times, I want to dress my youngest son (who's still a baby) in an angel costume or dress him as a bunny....
We settled on a pumpkin.

Anyway,sorry for the rant!!

Unfortunately it's not necessarily just the name that links to gender. From experience I've found that sometimes looks are even more powerful than the name. Let me elaborate. My name is Elizabeth and I look and act like a guy much of the time, or so I'm told, which is who I am so I don't really give a damn. This gets really interesting when I present my visa or introduce myself. There are pretty much two responses I generally get. The first don't notice/don't care and nothing out of the norm happens. The second group questions my identity saying "you're name's not Elizabeth" or "this isn't you." After being assured that my name is indeed Elizabeth, this group further splits into two groups. The one group apologizes profously stating they mistook me for a guy, while the other group takes pity on me stating "I thought Elizabeth was a girl's name." This group seems to think I'm some unfortunate guy who was given a girl's name by my parents. Interesting reaction, no?

Because of the trouble sometimes associated with my name, I've considered maybe changing it to something a little more androgynous, though I'm not sure if it's worth it. The names I've considered include Jayden (Jay for short), Sloan/Sloane, Trace, Chase, Mikey, Harper, Hunter, and Mitch.

All said and done, I think society should do away with both gender and race. This would create the equality so many are looking for. Where gender would still be key though would be for sex specific health. Other than that, in my opinion of course, people should be equal in every regard. Just my two cents worth.

Unfortunately it's not necessarily just the name that links to gender. From experience I've found that sometimes looks are even more powerful than the name. Let me elaborate. My name is Elizabeth and I look and act like a guy much of the time, or so I'm told, which is who I am so I don't really give a damn. This gets really interesting when I present my visa or introduce myself. There are pretty much two responses I generally get. The first don't notice/don't care and nothing out of the norm happens. The second group questions my identity saying "you're name's not Elizabeth" or "this isn't you." After being assured that my name is indeed Elizabeth, this group further splits into two groups. The one group apologizes profously stating they mistook me for a guy, while the other group takes pity on me stating "I thought Elizabeth was a girl's name." This group seems to think I'm some unfortunate guy who was given a girl's name by my parents. Interesting reaction, no?

Because of the trouble sometimes associated with my name, I've considered maybe changing it to something a little more androgynous, though I'm not sure if it's worth it. The names I've considered include Jayden (Jay for short), Sloan/Sloane, Trace, Chase, Mikey, Harper, Hunter, and Mitch.

All said and done, I think society should do away with both gender and race. This would create the equality so many are looking for. Where gender would still be key though would be for sex specific health. Other than that, in my opinion of course, people should be equal in every regard. Just my two cents worth.

Unfortunately it's not necessarily just the name that links to gender. From experience I've found that sometimes looks are even more powerful than the name. Let me elaborate. My name is Elizabeth and I look and act like a guy much of the time, or so I'm told, which is who I am so I don't really give a damn. This gets really interesting when I present my visa or introduce myself. There are pretty much two responses I generally get. The first don't notice/don't care and nothing out of the norm happens. The second group questions my identity saying "you're name's not Elizabeth" or "this isn't you." After being assured that my name is indeed Elizabeth, this group further splits into two groups. The one group apologizes profously stating they mistook me for a guy, while the other group takes pity on me stating "I thought Elizabeth was a girl's name." This group seems to think I'm some unfortunate guy who was given a girl's name by my parents. Interesting reaction, no?

Because of the trouble sometimes associated with my name, I've considered maybe changing it to something a little more androgynous, though I'm not sure if it's worth it. The names I've considered include Jayden (Jay for short), Sloan/Sloane, Trace, Chase, Mikey, Harper, Hunter, and Mitch.

All said and done, I think society should do away with both gender and race. This would create the equality so many are looking for. Where gender would still be key though would be for sex specific health. Other than that, in my opinion of course, people should be equal in every regard. Just my two cents worth.