Kentucky bill that could "police" the gender of names

Normally we don’t talk about politics on here, but in Kentucky there is a bill targeting gender transitioning of minors that has a provision that may be relevant to the name-nerd community. One of the provisions is banning a court from granting a legal name change to a minor if the court determines the name change is to help facilitate a gender transition (and another from allowing a birth certificate to be amended to reflect such a name change, when there are other kinds of name changes they would amend the record for).

Notwithstanding anyone’s opinion on the ethics of medically transitioning a minor (and that shouldn’t be discussed here in keeping with the general “no politics” rule), the provision I pointed out could enshrine a legal definition of what a “male” and “female” name is in that state (with ramifications potentially felt by any parent wanting to change or even name their baby, or a cisgender person wishing to rename themselves, beyond the transgender community). I don’t live in Kentucky, but if someone sees this and wishes to point out this absurd IMO (and likely unconstitutional as it goes against precedents not specific to the transgender community on the right to a name change) provision in this bill here’s the contact page for the Kentucky legislators.

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Oh. [name_f]My[/name_f]. Gosh.

Regardless of the politics surrounding it, this is ridiculous. Who gets to decide the gender of a name? [name_m]History[/name_m]? Associations? Things are always changing. Names evolve, just as language evolves. Who’s to say that [name_u]George[/name_u] is a boys’ name and [name_f]Opal[/name_f] is a girls’ name? And what about names associated with one gender in a certain language and another gender in another?

I view every name as gender neutral.

This is absurd.

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This is a very good point.

How would you go about categorising names like Aubrey, Harper or Vivian? What about Avery or Emerson etc? Names that these days are neutral in usage, like Taylor, Quinn, Rowan etc? Or nicknamey names like Charlie, Frankie, Rory? That’s without even getting on to how you’d gender words…

I know there are of course countries with lists you must select a name from, so i suppose it could be something like that but, wow…

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It looks like this proposal did not go through (although there is another transphobic bill that looks like it’s about to pass in Kentucky).

Such stupidity.