one thing that casually interests me about trans self-naming conventions is that while transmasculine names tend to align at least somewhat witih broader naming trends for children, transfeminine ones tend to do so less. i think this has to do with the fact that masculinized names are, on average, less interesting than feminized ones, which means that people choosing masc names (for themselves or for their kids) often need to reach into obscurity to find ones that sound good. hence your biblical names, your noun names, etc. there's nothing wrong with Leo and Ezra and River, but they're also borne of a relative lack of interesting options.
meanwhile, feminized names have a basically infinite capacity for variation and play. the mormon Kayleighs and their variations are almost all feminized, for whatever reason. the likelihood that the mother of a feminized infant will choose a strange/absurd name for that infant far outweighs the likelihood of an adult woman choosing that for herself, both bc the latter is aware she'll actually have to live with that name, and because the range of acceptable options is wider, anyway. So your trans girl names will range from, say, Emily to Lilith, and those two are far closer to each other than they are to the likes of Mackyenseiagh (pronounced mckenzie)
likewise i think that the stereotype re: nonbinary names ("Sock" and so on) is less a testament to the perceived immaturity of self-namers (this, anyway, is pretty much always grounded in a combo of transphobia, ableism, and ageism, as the nonbinary subject is often assumed to be a neurodivergent teenager who will at some point 'grow out of it') makes a lot of sense when you consider the persistent and unavoidable gendering even of names that ought to be genderless, and/or the ability of names to travel across gender lines but never remain androgynous. mckenzie from the above post is a good example - a name more commonly given to feminized people now, at one point masculinized.
like, is a nonbinary person naming themself "Sock" so absurd, or is the real absurdity located in a binary regime of gender so complete that no 'normative' or 'serious' name is safe form it?
#I also think that like. the reason there are fewer interesting masculinized names (at least in the United States)#is in large part because names can change from being considered masculine to being considered feminine but almost never the reverse#a name being perceived as having even a hint of femininity means it is completely unusable for a baby who is amab#but a traditionally masculine name which is starting to be perceived as slightly feminine is a good strong name for a baby who is afab#so weβre left with increasingly narrow options for masculine names and a huge and interesting variety for feminine names
this is so huge too - it speaks to the ways that feminization "marks" everything it touches, whereas masculinity, including in language (words like "he" and "mankind" and "dude" being argued [falsely] to be "gender-neutral"). a suit can be androgynous, but never a dress. and so on. masculinity is also viewed as aspirational, and that definitely fuels these one-sided cross-gender naming conventions.
