Your name must make your gender clear

I have a Latvian friend who told me that there all female forenames must end in a vowel. Also her married surname is a 'feminine' version of her DH's, spelt slightly differently to end in a vowel.

John Wayne's name was actually Marion.

I know of a lady called Peregrine. Her father was drunk when her went to the registry office really liked the name.

Both my sons's names have been used as girls names. However I have only come across them being used as girls names in celebrities and don't know anyone in real life with it as a girls name. In fact a know of a couple of boys with the same name. No one has ever passed comment on it in 17 years.

To be fair one of the names is commonly used as a male Irish name and the other is a Welsh male name.

German rules are that children with a neutral first name must be given a gender-defining middle name. And you can only give a child a name if you can prove it's a person's name and not something made up.

See how it happens. One eccentric parent gives a girl a boy's name. Then someone else with a son becomes "stupidly worried that everyone will tease him for having a girl's name". And anyone else who has a baby boy in need of a name thinks, no not that one, it'll cause trouble for him. And so that name become lost to boys. Never the other way around, though.

Our son has a boy's name, but there is a girl a few years older than him with the same name - her mum told me she knew it was a boy's name but liked it and used it anyway, it is quite unusual round here. DS goes to high school this year which the girl goes to(they went to different primaries), and I am stupidly worried that everyone will tease him for having a girl's name.

Andrea and Nicola are boys names in Italy.

I've heard that German first names must, by law, enable people to easily tell the gender of the person.

In iceland the majority of people have a patronym instead of a surname so gudmundsdottir or gunmundsson so gender is immediately obvious anyway.

I agree Abigail It's interesting that Iceland has among the highest rates of female participation in politics and business of any country. I don't think taking male sounding names is going to do much for women.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne - Cached - Similar
Marion Mitchell Morrison (born Marion Robert Morrison; May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), better known by his stage name John Wayne, was an American film ...

I don't think I've ever met a male Marion. Anyone expecting?

flora Hillary? Lesley? Alex, Charlie, Sam, Dannie, Eddie, Frankie, Jamie, Jude, Chris etc etc. Who can say whether they were first male or female names? I was looking at this site

usefulenglish.ru/vocabulary/unisex-names

My name has always been female in Britain, always male in Eastern Europe. I don't know if the names have a common root or developed separately and just happen to be spelt the same IYSWIM.

Yes its a good thing, IMO for job applications as much as anything. I would guess that some employers, wrongly!!! still favour men because of the pregnancy issue.

As others have said there are now so many new names around from our increasingly diverse population that I wouldn't expect to know someone's gender from their name alone the way people may have done 200 years ago.

My dd is merryn it is used as a boys name as well but spelt Merin or merren and there is a boy at my elder sons school called this and my ds3 was told that his sister couldn't be merryn as its a boys name. She is and I think its a unisex name but we like the spelling with a y.

Cynical me says, unisex names are usually male names in the process of becoming female ones. "Being associated with female contaminates it as a male name" seems all too true.

But I thought the case in Iceland was about the use of a name that wasn't on the official list of approved names, not because it was a boy's name rather than a girl's one. If that's what it was, the government there is fighting valiantly, and apparently failing, to keep parents from stealing all the boys' names to give to girls.

The writer Evelyn Waugh was married (temporarily) to a woman also named Evelyn. Their friends used to call them "She-Evelyn" and "He-Evelyn".

Men are the default Flora. Women can aspire to being men but not the other way round. Tis shit.

There are a lot of kids at school where i have no idea whether they are a boy or girl until I meet them. Sometimes I don't even know then as they are all wearing the same uniform and their hairstyles can be quite unisex too. All I can do is wait for clues from the other children and hope i get it right if I need to know their gender for any reason (not very often).

I know quite a few Ashleys, which I'd only known as a girls name before I moved here, there are a few surnames as forenames girls and boys around as well, before I even get started on the names I didn't think were names.

I don't know whether it's good or bad to have your gender identified by your name. It's more whether people treat you differently based solely on gender, that definitely IS a problem.

My name is a female name in Britain, but a male name in several Eastern European languages. I've never had any problems with people mixing it up.

Don't Icelandic surnames signify gender anyway?

It wouldn't be a problem if being identified as female didn't single you out for discrimination.

There seems to be a bit of a trend for girls to have male names like Dylan, Elliott but not for boys to have female names.