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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think we’re way past the peak era of “boy names on girls.” There are some still hanging in there (Charlie, Blake, Emerson still ranked high) but I think of that phenomenon as a 90s-pre Covid 2020s thing. People seem to love the super fanciful princessy names for girls these days. [/quote]

I think around 2020 is when it started to dawn on people that trying to make little girls masculine was actually maybe a very anti-feminist thing. Obviously if a girl doesn't want to be feminine or perform femininity for others, she should absolutely be allowed to. I'm actually pretty androgynous most of the time. But there was this phase that a lot of Gen X and older Millennial parents went through where it was like they wouldn't let their girls be feminine even if the wanted to. Like "no, your name is Finn, you are sporty, your favorite color is green, and you want to be an engineer." And if that girl wanted to wear pink dresses or liked princesses or wanted to be a ballerina, that was wrong and bad.

I had a DD in 2016 and about half of the parents I encountered were like that. And the other half, which I belong to, was like "uh, what's wrong with pink and dresses and playing with baby dolls and liking stereotypically feminine things? why are those things bad and stuff you associate more with boys good?" Because that's actually a lot of internalized misogyny to decide a stylistic choice or interest is bad just because it's associated with women, right?

And now 10 years later it's more like 20% of parents I meet who still think girls liking feminine things is terrible, and most people have figured out that it's okay if your DD has a feminine name and loves pink and wears tutus for fun. She can do all that and still be a worthwhile person, there's nothing inhebtly better about masculinity.

But it's been a real journey over the years and I've heard a lot of supposedly feminist people say bizarrely critical things about femininity. People brains really broke a little there for a while.

End of rant, this is just something I have encountered a lot and it drives me crazy.[/quote]

This is a white person thing. Where I live more than half the kids are now Hispanic and they are all about traditional gender roles. The juxtaposition is pretty funny when you get parents talking. I remember at preschool drop-off one white dad was bragging "Joey loves STEM and we got her a telescope for Christmas, she's definitely going to be an engineer." And Hispanic dad just looked at him like he was crazy and said "Isabella loves cooking and cleaning with Mama." [/quote]

It is indeed a white person thing. We have had to move a lot so our kids have been to three different elementary schools with very different demographics. One was majority middle class black families. One was like 50% white, 40% black, 10% hispanic, but mostly UMC families. And one was like 75% white and all UMC families plus a small school with a kind of crunchy philosophy (not technically Waldorf but like as much like Waldorf as you find in a public school). These schools exist along a continuum where there first school's approach to gender was like 1985 -- there were likely a few kids who will one day come out as gay, but not much gender bending at all and almost no discussion of it. And names were pretty traditional boy or girl names with a handful of truly unisex names thrown in (Jordan, Alex, Morgan, etc.). Second school talked about gender a lot, lots of the girls had "boy" names or masculine nicknames, lots of the parents were very intent on pushing girls away from feminine pursuits like dance or caring about clothes and towards sports and STEM careers (though parent of boys did not encourage their boys to pursue feminine activities either, so actually this school just felt very masculine in genera and there was a lot of pressure to do sports and love math/science and my ballet-loving girl definitely felt like the odd one out). Third school, fully 20% of those kids were non-binary and we got used to getting notices from the school that a child was going by a different name and/or pronouns moving forward. My kids went with the flow at all three schools and I'm glad they had those experiences, but have to admit as an adult, the experience gave me whiplash and was extremely eye opening about how other folks are parenting. It was a good experience for me, too, but definitely a steeper learning curve for me than for my kids.[/quote]

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