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considering that chart: 2015. don’t use steroids to get buff, kids, it’ll ruin your hairline and take you from twink to haggard faster than bucky barnes can punch someone

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The Linguistic Society of America has guidelines for inclusive language, including what one might consider when writing example sentences:

“The use of ‘gender-neutral’ names such as Chris, Dana, Kim, Lee, and Pat can help avoid stereotyping either males or females.”

But how neutral are these names, really? It probably depends, and it probably changes over time. Meredith used to be “a boy’s name”, but I don’t know of any men named Meredith these days, and I know a lot of women named Meredith.

To choose the most gender-neutral name, one has to know what names are out there, when they were being used, and how their use is distributed. Truly, parents don’t really know the gender of their child at birth (and let’s not even get into sex), but assignments are often made, and names are chosen and registered... and in this database, only “male” and “female” categories were available.

From a list of baby names registered in England and Wales from 1996 to 2000, I was able to pull together the graph below (see the top picture for high-res). The x-axis (horizontal) is the number of male-designated babies who were registered, and the y-axis (vertical) is the number of female-designated babies who were registered. The black diagonal line (x=y) shows where the number of female and male babies are equal. So, if 100 female babies were given the name “Lee” and 100 male babies were given the name “Lee” during this time frame, the name “Lee” would appear directly over the black line. The color of the name indicates how many total babies (of any designation) were given the name.

Jordan is by far the most common name over all, although Ashleigh and Courtney were given to more female-designated babies (though, note that Ashley is overlapping Tyler on the male-biased side). The names that are optimally the most “neutral” and popular seem to by Morgan (about 1403 per year) and Taylor (909). Cody (174) and Devon (164) are also very neutral, but they are much rarer. Rio (114) and Mackenzie (122) are neutral as well, but they are super-rare because they aren’t attested ever year. The less common a name is, the less likely someone is to have met people of any gender who have that name. If you’ve only ever met a Jamie who is a girl, you might think it’s a girl’s name, even though it’s pretty far to the right in the “male-biased” space.

So if you have to write an example sentence and you want to choose a name that doesn’t evoke any particular gender, I’d recommend choosing Taylor or Morgan, which are optimally balanced and common.

Do you think Fulgrim is a leopard print queen? I like to think he is. BUT: is he a Lisa Frank leopard print queen? Or a Peggy Bundy classic leopard?