In 2013, Katie Hopkins appeared on British TV show “This Morning” and got into a bit of a tussle over children’s names, but now, a decade later, she has been proven, at least somewhat, right.
First, she said baby names are getting crazier. True.
Second, she said rude children are often named Tyler. Also true. But one thing she did get wrong (at least in 2024) is assuming that Tyler is a boy.
Gender-neutral baby names are projected to be all the rage in 2024 for American girls while boy names will favor gender-neutral surnames, the New York Post reported.
“I’m seeing a lot of whimsical, gender-neutral surnames being given as first names,” Steph Coffield, a Minnesota-based baby consultant, told Yahoo Life. “We’re seeing girls’ names becoming more masculine and boys’ names becoming softer, too.”
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“The way things are going, with more acceptance of non-binary people, parents aren’t afraid to give boys softer more feminine names. We’re already there with girls being more masculine, and that will continue,” she added.
“Some parents will come to me asking for one that works for a boy and a girl ahead of time, then they can stick with it, whatever the gender.”
So what will these new baby names look like?
According to Yahoo Life, some of the most popular projected baby names for 2024 are Collins, Sloane, Maddison, and Spencer for girls and Cameron, Carter, and Waylon for boys.
Will gender-neutral names become the dominant trend for newborns?
This trend is a natural extension of a greater cultural sanitation of sex and gender, a continual homogenization of the genders into one indistinguishable mish-mash.
Although English is unlike Spanish where nearly every word has a gender, English has many gendered words. Often these words describe a profession. For decades we have seen attempts to gender-neutralize professional names. Stewardesses are now flight attendants. Congressmen, chairmen, spokesmen, foremen, policemen and firemen are all names that the progressives deem to be passè. Now, it is congressperson, chairperson, spokesperson, foreperson, police officer, and firefighter. Even friendly phrases like “bud” can draw the ire of the politically correct gender police.
Sanitizing baby names pushes the leftist habit of using language to control reality to the next level. It is similar to requiring people to declare their pronouns or use the preferred pronouns of others under penalty of termination from their jobs, and it continues the nonsensical notion of someone’s gender being “assigned at birth.”
Gender can not be “assigned” at birth or any other point in someone’s life. It is also not a “guess” by the doctor as one first-grade teacher recently told a student. Gender is determined by the chromosomes you are given by God at conception. You remain male or female from conception to death, and there are no tricks of language or medical interventions that can alter this reality.
Progressives have been straining against biology for more than a decade now, but they can not overcome what the reasonable know to be true. You do not need to declare your pronouns because your name and gender foresignify it.
Embracing this trend only allows progressives to continue to bolster their positions by giving declared pronouns a necessity. Imagine you are a school teacher examining the roll sheet for next year’s incoming class. Since names are another manifestation of people’s gender, you know Hank is a boy and Eleanor is a girl without ever having to see them.
From this information, you see that you have more boys or girls in one particular class, and you can make arrangements for curriculum accordingly. More boys this year? We are going to need more structure and activity. More girls? More creativity and discussion-based material.
However, with a classroom full of Collins Smith and Sloane Williams, you no longer have this information. You can no longer pre-prepare material as effectively, and it is now a necessity that students declare their pronouns because their names no longer indicate it.
Further, neutralizing names continues the unfortunate modern severance of people from their ancestry. It atomizes people and removes a sense of connection with all that proceeds them.
When you are born male or female, your gender opens you up to a certain pool of names. Within this pool, parents often choose to pay homage to many great traditions. Many of my male friends are “juniors” or the third/fourth/fifth of some great familial succession of male names. Most of the Catholics I have known name their children after the Saints or Popes “Cecilia”, “Agnes” or “John Paul,” and the Evangelicals draw their names from Biblical figures “Enoch”, “Esther”, and “Naomi.” Especially in the South, it is common to select names that pay homage to great figures like southern generals or statesmen.
Gender-neutralizing names entrenches the isolation of modernity that progressivism thrives in. It allows you to become nothing more than a historical vagabond, merely free-floating in the moment without connection to all that produced you. In this void, ahistorical absurdisms like transgenderism can slip in and manifest.
In an abnormal time, when men believe they can breastfeed, being normal is suddenly a radical act. We should pray this push to take gender ideology to children will provoke the same response from rational parents that it has in public schools, that it should be rejected outright and that it will spur a reinvigorated interest in traditional values. We must be continually wary of creating men with no connection to themselves, their faith, or their people.