This one gets my ire up, too. Who do people think they are, cross-dressing your kid for you that way?
I am really shocked too that anyone in their right mind would call a baby girl named Frances, Frank! I have heard that people who think it will give their daughters some sort of professional advantage to be thought male on paperwork (how inherently misogynistic is that?!) name their girls completely male names, like Henry, and it's sad, because each time a boy's name crosses the gender line, boys can never use it again, and boys start running out of names except by making up new ones, and made-up names sound very silly to me.
Casualties of the well-intentioned gender-crossing war: these names were once exclusively for boys, and now they are exclusively for girls:
Laverne, Shirley, Stacy, Tracy, Dana, Leslie, Marion, Courtney, Avery, and plenty more.
They figure anything with a -y, -ie, or -a ending is fair game, but now, we are even having parents naming daughters things like Henry, David, and so on! and they think they are being progressive, when actually, the assumptions underlying that choice are inherently misogynistic (that being more like a boy, or being thought to be more like a boy, will make a girl either better somehow, or more successful somehow).
People who do this never stop to consider the long-term consequences to boys' available naming pool. After all, stealing girl names for boys is never seen as giving any advantage, and most people have the sense to realize what a social disadvantage a boy named Sue, faces. I wish they would quit hijacking boy names for girls in what, in my opinion, is a misguided belief that appearing somehow less a girl, is somehow an advantage for females.
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