Given Names and gender and stereotypes

What's in a name.....

Recently a friend of mine got all hung up on the name of a dog....  In her mind Casey is a male name.  I guess she did not follow the Facebook posts of the woman the dog belonged to.... I knew that Casey was female.  I never really thought about the dog's name.... when I was a kid I had a girl doll, a friend of Barbie, whose name was Casey. And I mean that the doll was packaged and sold as "Casey". (Casey was my favorite Barbie doll.)  I have a female relative named Kasey.

I have a female relative named Terri. The first time my parents met a boy named Terry they were taken aback.  In my parents era people more often chose given names out of The Bible for their children, or reused the given name of a relative.  I myself have posed the question more than once or twice: "what ever happened to Mary and Jane and Carol?"  To my dad, if he did not know a child's name, all boys were Butch and all girls were Susie, and that was forgotten after they introduced themselves.

baby names that work equally for girl or for boy -- there are names missing from the list on the website.... what about Stacey/Stacy,...   I went to school with a girl named Stacey,..so I thought that was only a girl name until I heard of actor Stacy Keach......

I have a friend named Dale, a woman,.... wasn't Dale another one of Barbie's friends? Dale Evans was the wife of Roy Rogers.

People, especially the older generations, get hung up on given names.  And rightly so, because now days you really don't know by the given name if you are going to find a female or a male.  I mean Brooklyn (you're thinking 'girl' right?) , and if you've even been to Brooklyn -why?  The same for Dakota (thinking 'boy'? guess again), which I think would be a great name for an Alaskan Husky or a Malamute, and have you been to the Dakotas? 

DAKOTA Fanning     and      BROOKLYN Beckham

Ranker.com will give you a list of famous people with whatever name you are curious about.


When I was young there was a Neil Diamond song I really liked,..it was Desiree.... great song..... but I commented to my mother that "if I have a daughter I'm going to name her Desiree."  To which my mother replied, "No you won't." ....and Mom was right, because a year later my favorite names were Sarah and Michael, and I would not have dreamed of using Desiree for anything other than a middle name. 

The point, though, is that in this day and age we must let go of every type of stereotyping and antiquated thought when it comes to names.  Actually naming stereotypes should never have existed t to begin with, because there are millions of people on the planet, and everyone has their own ideas of what names should be given to girls or boys or human beings.

Personally, I would like to see a return to names from the early 1900s.... Emma, Helen, Lillian, Augustus, Charles, Frederick.  What, I ask you, is wrong with those perfectly lovely names?





This is Casey, the mellow old girl: