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Gender-Bending Baby Names
Heidi Klum just named her daughter Lou. And George Stephanopoulos has little girls named Elliott and Harper. VIEW OUR GALLERY of celebrity children who cross the line.
Heidi Klum’s cross-gendered name choice for her newborn daughter, Lou, may be chic for girls in Germany and France, but it hasn’t been in the U.S. Top 1,000 since the early 1970s, right about the time other ambisexual names—Jamie and Kelly and Casey—were starting to heat up.
View Our Gallery of Celebrities With Gender-Bending Baby Names
That’s when the first wave of feminist parents began giving birth to little free-to-be-whatever Kims and Jessies, followed in the 1980s by a wave of androgynous junior executives with such upmarket surnames as Courtney, Lindsay, and Whitney.
Sexy female stars with androgynous or frankly male names such as Glenn, Drew, Cameron, and Daryl helped fuel the trend. The boys’ response: initial retreat to safe masculine naming territory. Now, though, parents seem to feel liberated enough to turn to soft classics such as Joshua and Elijah for their sons, confident enough to continue using names like Aiden and Lane for boys even as they’re adopted for girls.
While names may be flowing more freely across gender lines these days than ever before, the practice is as old as naming history. Alice, Crystal, Emma, Evelyn, Florence, Jocelyn, Kimberly, Lucy, and Maud were all originally male names, while Christian, Douglas, Bennet, and Clarence were once common for girls.
The first tally of popular names in America, from 1880, lists dozens of gender-bending choices. Boyish nicknames for girls—Vinnie, Jimmie, Lonnie—were in vogue, and the roster lists 46 girls named John, 30 named William, 23 named James, and a whopping 131 named Lou.
There were also 14 boys named Lou that year (in addition to about a thousand named Louis and Louie). The list includes 476 male Willies and 192 females; 183 girl Ollies and 63 boys. Carrie, in several spellings, was popular for both sexes.
In 1880 there were also a handful—too many to be a mistake—of girls named Henry, Robert, Joseph, Clifford, and Walter, and boys named Rose, Grace, Cora, Flora, and Daisy. One shudders.
Pop culture boasts a long history of, especially, girls with boys’ names, from Hemingway’s Lady Brett to Audrey Hepburn’s Reggie in Charade to Gossip Girl’s femme-y Blair. Ashley Wilkes is the most notable fictional male heartthrob with a girly name, though macho athletes called Peyton (Manning), Jenson (Button), and Tracy (McGrady) are changing all that.
The hottest cross-gendered names today? Alex, Auden, Avery, Bailey, Elliot, Evan, Finley, Harper, Hayden, Justice, Luca, Mason, Noah, Riley, Rowan, and Skyler are all widely used for both sexes. Also fashionable are place names, nature names, surname-names, and word names—from London to Leaf—that don’t come tagged with any gender identity.
A new study even claims that giving your daughter a male name can help her make more money and get better promotions—and the more boyish the name, the better.
My prediction: Gender stereotypes connected with names, as with people themselves, will continue to fall away as boys and girls wear the same clothes, hold the same jobs, and yes, are both called Lou.
Pamela Redmond Satran is the coauthor with Linda Rosenkrantz of 10 name books, most recently Beyond Ava & Aiden, and a developer of Nameberry.com.
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Pamela Redmond Satran is a developer of the baby-naming site nameberry.com and the coauthor of 10 books on names, including Beyond Ava & Aiden, due out next month.
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Pamela Redmond Satran is a developer of the baby-naming site nameberry.com and the coauthor of 10 books on names, including Beyond Ava & Aiden, due out next month.
Lou used to be short for Louise and/or LouAnn, too, remember.
I love thinking about how names have changed through the years. I went to school with a proliferation of Linda's and Barbara's (excuse the inappropriate parenthesis).
My own name (which I won't divulge) was not that common (it still isn't), but as luck would have it when we moved to another state in my babyhood there were three girls with the same name ON MY BLOCK. So much for originality!
But reading your article, and the reference to the name "London" made me recall the now forgotten comedian who frequented "The Ed Sullivan Show." His name was London Lee.
His best joke was something along the lines "Yeah, I'm London. My folks named me after the city I was conceived in. Thank God, they weren't in Elizabeth, New Jersey."
I, too, love to observe the name trends over the years. As a baby boomer, I know scads of Debbie's, Linda's, Mary's, Susan's, and a Nancy or two. You don't see many toddlers with those names.
In the early late 80's, early 90's, I was already dismayed at the ridiculous number of Brittany's and Ashley's. Now those girls are around 20 and surrounded by millions of other girls named Brittany and Ashley. I never understood people who insisted on naming their baby a name every other child seemed to have.
My son, Loren, is accused of having a "girl's name" sometimes. But he likes it, and so do I.
I'm a Linda - born in 1954. My mother proudly cutout a magazine article saying that Linda was the most popular name of 1954 and it is in my Baby Book today. She had gone through life with the name Faril Bea that people could not pronounce or spell. She made up her mind that her children would have "regular" names. I spent most of my shool days as Linda #1,2 or 3 since there were always so many in every class. But, no one mispronounces it! There must be a happy medium.
As an American male named Leslie, I struggled to find other boys and men with my name as I was growing up in New York. There was late Leslie Howard, and later Leslie Gelb. I became Les to all who knew me. Then one day on vacation in Canada I heard someone yell of "Hey Leslie!" in the corridor of the airport and in response a hulking high school football player ran over to his teammates.
Two decades later I have ended up living and working in Canada, where there are more men named Leslie than I can count, although the percentage is small compared to those named Gordon, John or Michael.
Turns out in Canada there are plenty of men and boys named Leslie, Taylor, Morgan, Ashley, Tracy, and so on, but I'm starting to see a trend that I consider unfortunate -- I met a young woman named Ethan and weeks later another named Christopher.
After seven years in Canada I proudly call myself Leslie and it's only my friends south of the border that call me Les.
Lesley, Ashley, Courtney, Kimberly, etc., are all British surnames that were given to boys. Originally they were noble-class names. Eventually they became popular girls names in America.
"Lou" is a common name for a girl in Germany, where Heidi is from. My name is Lou. My partner's name is Leigh. Leigh's family is from England; it's a common name for a man. Too bad the author is hung up on names.
Thank you.
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