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Trivia: Names or shortened forms of names which don't give away your gender

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DynamicSpirit

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Lindsay/Lindsey (another one where the pronunciation doesn't give the gender away, but the spelling usually does)
 
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341o2

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Ricky can be a shortened form of Richard, while Rikki is a girl's name
May not quite count, but Gillian often becomes "Jill" while Gilbert can become "Gil", presumably pronounced with a "g"
 

amateur

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I think gender neutral (name) is the term which you are referring to
 

Busaholic

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I'm a Tim, my late mother-in-law was a Tim, to her husband anyway, Reason = she'd been a GPO telephone operator. Used to cause confusion occasionally at family get-togethers (e.g. 'when Tim was first pregnant...').
 

Crossover

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It seems Jess can be either - I know of a guy through work who is named Jess - not sure if it is short for anything in that case though!

Though I never met them as it was before my time there, I have heard a story from work of a consultant they used named Val and got a surprise when Val visited the office and was a guy. I think he was American which may or may not have something to do with it?
 

richw

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It seems Jess can be either - I know of a guy through work who is named Jess - not sure if it is short for anything in that case though!

?

Jesse I believe to be a male name as in Jesse James or jesse Lingard
 

GusB

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It seems Jess can be either - I know of a guy through work who is named Jess - not sure if it is short for anything in that case though!

Though I never met them as it was before my time there, I have heard a story from work of a consultant they used named Val and got a surprise when Val visited the office and was a guy. I think he was American which may or may not have something to do with it?
Val Kilmer, Val Doonican...
 

whhistle

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And all this will only get worse with parents these days calling their kids whatever they want.
 

pemma

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Though I never met them as it was before my time there, I have heard a story from work of a consultant they used named Val and got a surprise when Val visited the office and was a guy. I think he was American which may or may not have something to do with it?

Valentine is a male name.
 

pemma

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Kelly is another. I once worked somewhere with two people both named Kelly Kelly (matching forenames and surnames!) One was female and Kelly was her married name, but the other was male and presumably just had parents with either a cruel sense of humour or a lack of imagination!

I think society is more accepting of a woman with a traditionally masculine name than it is of a man with a traditionally feminine name. Not sure why, but there we go...

The name Kelly came about as an Anglicisation of the Irish surname Ó Ceallaigh. Apparently it was pretty much only given to boys as a first name until the 1960s.

Maybe in not too long someone will say "Did that man have cruel parents giving him the feminine name of Taylor?" ;)
 

Thebaz

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I'm a Ken, which by most people's reckoning would make me male, and they'd be right. However, a friend of mine has a -female- partner called Ken, which is really hard to get used to when we're in the same place together!

When I was at school, my art teacher was called Stephanie although she preferred to be called Steve.
 

341o2

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Sydney can be a girl's name eg Sydney Penny (US actress) as well as Sidney, while I came across a lady known as "Del" today
 

whhistle

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How are gender neutral names in any way a bad thing?
It's not particularly the actual reasoning behind it, it's about those people doing it:
1) Because they want to, without giving thought to the child in the future
2) People who call a boy a name, which is clearly a girls name
3) Parents who do it to be fashionable and "different"

It sounds like I don't support it, I do, but then I follow on where the journey goes:
Like those people who refuse to say whether their child is a male or female because they want to allow the child to decide, and didn't want to give them a label...
No wonder kids these days are confused on what they are:
tumblr_m2x4fpa1wp1qznvi3o1_500.jpg


But hey, why do we need to call it "Strawberry Jam" when we can just call it "Jam" and all other types of jams... just call them all the same thing. If you're allergic to blackberries, tough - we didn't want to label it, so we just call it jam.

People who call fizzy drinks "pop" is another one. Why people use a generic term "pop" is a confusion in my life. I'm sure someone told me it was because in the early days, there was only one flavour - lemon. So it became known as a generic term for that product.
But what happens if you like lemonade but hate cola? Asking for "pop" could net you in a rubbish situation.

But then it's just the way people are going.
It's all about celebrating differences and being pressured to find differences. Being "the same" or "similar" isn't popular these days.
If you've ever seen The Hunger Games - the people who live in The Capital - that's where we're heading as a race. There's just a few humans who are there already...
 

Abpj17

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2) People who call a boy a name, which is clearly a girls name

Does that matter? I'd like to think that it increasingly won't in the future. It's on the spectrum of...oh that's a boy's toy...or that's a girl's job.
 

whhistle

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Does that matter? I'd like to think that it increasingly won't in the future. It's on the spectrum of...oh that's a boy's toy...or that's a girl's job.
In the present, it would bother me if my parents had named me "Mary" if I was a boy, or "John" if I was a girl.

There will always be a cross over between toys. I'd say it's fine and relatively healthy for a boy to play with a pram these days. But there is a fact that much of this stuff forgets - chemestry. Boys and girls have different chemicals in their brains that naturally push each gender towards certain things. Yes, I'm all for women becoming oil riggers, but it's far and few between. That doesn't mean we should push women into those roles.

I agree as the future comes upon us, we'll see more and more "strange" names, which will be gender neutral. Way in the future, I suspect we'll drop the use of a surname all together.
 

pemma

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Way in the future, I suspect we'll drop the use of a surname all together.

I suspect people will start choosing new surnames when they get married instead of one person changing their name and the other keeping their name.
 

DelayRepay

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There is a lady at work called Lesley. Her husband is called Leslie.

They are both known as Les.

I used to deal with a colleague called Sam, but only ever by email. For two years I thought Sam was a man. Then I met Sam in person and discovered Sam was female.
 
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