Why we threw out the traditional gendered baby name playbook

Priya
2026-05-06T02:42:46+02:00

I was thirty-two weeks pregnant, sitting at the kitchen island at three in the morning, aggressively pointing out cells in a Google Sheet. My husband was asleep. The spreadsheet was simply titled The Child. Row forty-seven was the name Emerson. I had color-coded it yellow for a hard maybe.

As a pediatric nurse, I've looked at thousands of patient charts. You see a name, you form an instant clinical picture. It's a terrible habit but we all do it. You see Hunter and you assume he's going to need stitches from a skateboard accident. You see Elizabeth and you assume her mother will ask me about organic milk and private preschools. I wanted my kid's chart to be a blank slate. That's the real reason we looked into unisex baby names in the first place.

Not because we were trendy millennials trying to make a statement. Just because I know how hospital triage works and I know how people judge.

The spreadsheet that nearly broke my marriage

My doctor, Dr. Gupta, told me she sees a massive drop in pink and blue receiving blankets these days. She said nobody wants to lock their kid into a box before they even take their first breath, which makes sense to me. The data kind of backs up what I'm seeing in the waiting room anyway. Somewhere I read that there was an eighty-eight percent spike in these gender-neutral baby names over the last few decades. It feels right.

But the reality of finding one is a nightmare. I only know of a handful of names that are truly split down the middle in real life anyway. Jules. Koi. Robin. The rest just lean heavily one way until a pop star decides otherwise and ruins your careful planning.

My husband wanted something traditional. I wanted something that sounded like a mild weather pattern. We fought about the name Rowan for four consecutive days. It's exhausting to hold the weight of an entire human's future identity in your hands while also dealing with third-trimester heartburn.

The surname epidemic

People are just opening the phone book to the lawyers section and pointing these days. Carter. Lennox. Landry. It sounds like a corporate law firm instead of a kindergarten class. I get the appeal of giving a child a strong, professional edge, but sometimes I think we're just projecting our own corporate anxiety onto an infant. You name a kid Sterling and suddenly they need a tiny briefcase instead of a diaper bag.

I spent three weeks refusing to look at surnames. My husband kept typing them into the spreadsheet. I kept deleting them. It became a cold war of backspace and undo at all hours of the night.

Then there's the vintage nickname trend like Frankie and Billie which is fine if you want your baby to sound like a prohibition-era bartender.

The team green nursery aesthetic

We were waiting to find out the sex. Team Green, they call it on the internet. Which meant our registry was a vast, uninterrupted sea of oatmeal, terracotta, and sage.

My mother-in-law kept complaining she couldn't buy anything fun without knowing if it was a boy or a girl. I told her that dinosaurs don't care about gender, which she didn't appreciate. I ended up getting the Colorful Dinosaur Bamboo Baby Blanket for the nursery myself. It's a bamboo and organic cotton blend, and honestly, it's the one thing that gets used every single day in our house. The turquoise and lime green dinosaurs are just stylized enough that they don't look like cheap cartoon characters from a gas station. It keeps stable temperature well, which is great because my toddler runs hot like a furnace.

We also stocked up on basic neutral clothing. We got a few of the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuits. They're fine. They cover the kid. The organic cotton is soft and the envelope shoulders mean I don't have to drag a blowout over anyone's head, but honestly, it's a white onesie that will eventually get stained with sweet potato puree anyway.

The playground test

Listen, if you're going to pick an androgynous name, you've to do the screaming test in your backyard to see how it feels in your mouth.

You go to the back door and yell it into the alley while pretending they're running toward a busy street, because if it takes too many syllables to get out of your mouth it's an absolute liability. You also have to check the initials to make sure you don't accidentally spell out a terrible acronym that will haunt them in middle school.

We wanted something grounded. Nature words were highly appealing to me because they're just nouns. River, Wren, Arbor. A tree is just a tree. It carries no societal expectations. It doesn't demand that you play football or take ballet.

Speaking of things that actually bring me peace, my absolute favorite survival tool when we finally brought the baby home was the Panda Teether. When my toddler started cutting molars, it was a dark time in our house. I'd just throw this silicone panda in the fridge for twenty minutes. The textured bamboo detail on the side was exactly what those swollen gums needed. It saved my sanity on a Tuesday at four in the afternoon when nothing else worked and the kid was inconsolable.

Family negotiations and middle names

My family wanted something traditional. Hindi names are beautiful, but they're heavily gendered for the most part. My mother kept calling the bump beta, which just means child or son, but it carries cultural weight.

I explained to my mother that a unisex name might actually prevent subconscious bias later in life. A potential employer might be less likely to throw out a resume from a Taylor or a Morgan. She looked at me like I was insane, which is fair. The science on resume bias is pretty depressing, but I'm not entirely sure a name can fix systemic issues anyway. It just felt like giving my kid a slight head start, or at least a shield.

We compromised on the middle name, which is what I think to anyone dealing with stubborn grandparents. A highly fluid first name, paired with a heavy, traditional middle name. It gives the child an out. If they decide at eighteen that they hate being named after a body of water, they can pivot to their middle name without doing any legal paperwork.

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The paperwork

When my water broke, the spreadsheet was still unresolved. We had narrowed it down to three options. None of them were surnames.

In the hospital, after a mundane thirty hours of labor, the birth certificate coordinator walked in holding a clipboard. The room smelled like iodine and deep exhaustion. My hair was matted to my forehead.

I looked at my husband. I looked at this tiny, wrinkled, screaming potato resting on my chest. The baby didn't look like a corporate lawyer. The baby didn't look like a jazz singer. The baby just looked tired.

We wrote down the name. A simple, quiet noun. It fit perfectly then, and it still does now.

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Questions you're probably asking yourself

Are gender-neutral baby names actually split evenly between boys and girls?

Hardly ever. From what I've seen and read, most names lean heavily toward one sex in the actual birth registries. There are only a tiny handful of names like Blake or Landry that sit right on the fifty-fifty line. Don't obsess over the math. If it feels neutral to you, that's what matters.

How do you handle family members who hate unisex names?

You ignore them. Seriously. My mother-in-law had a lot of opinions until the baby was seriously born, and then she was too busy smelling the top of the baby's head to care what name was on the birth certificate. They get over it the second they hold the kid.

Can a baby name really prevent workplace bias later in life?

Maybe. Some sociologists think it helps blur the lines on a resume, which could theoretically get your kid through the first round of interviews in a heavily biased industry. But honestly, the world might look entirely different in twenty years anyway, so I wouldn't base your entire decision on a hypothetical corporate HR department.

What if I pick a unisex name and it suddenly becomes heavily linked to one gender?

This happens all the time. A celebrity names their daughter something traditionally masculine, and suddenly it's a top ten girl name for the next decade. You can't control culture, yaar. You just pick what you like and let the chips fall where they may.

Should the middle name be gender-neutral too?

I advise against it. Give them some contrast. If you go with a highly fluid first name, anchoring it with a traditional or family-specific middle name gives them options. It also appeases the grandparents, which is a nice bonus if you want free babysitting.