“As usual, baby names are reflecting a larger cultural shift,” says BabyCenter’s Global Editor in Chief Linda Murray. “Millennials are an open-minded and accepting group, and they don’t want their children to feel pressured to conform to stereotypes that might be restrictive.”
There is nothing new here. People have always given girls male names (for example Beverly and Hillary used to be exclusively male names until people started using them for girls, Francis was exclusively a male name until somebody decided to change the spelling for girls, male names are feminized by putting an “a” on them as in Roberta or Paula etc.). Once a name becomes identified as a female name, however, it is generally completely dropped for males — I do not think we will be seeing the phenomenon of “a boy named Sue” with millenial babies. We will continue to see girls called boys names (Rory, etc. which, amazingly now, people think is a girl’s name!) and, increasingly, (for both sexes) use of names that were never previously thought of as names at all as people try to be different. That too is nothing new (Vanessa, for example, was made up by Jonathan Swift then swiftly adopted.)