Madison, Ashley, Leslie: the male names that became female

The shift of male names: from Madison to Kendall

A forum participant claims a Hollywood screenwriter needed a name for the lead in a 1984 film. He wrote Madison. The film, Splash, was a hit, the name lodged in many American parents' minds, and today almost no boy in the United States is named Madison: statistically, anyone who has it is female. That, according to his account, is the whole mechanism. A popular fiction, a spike in girls being christened with the name, and a male name turned female without anyone signing the decree.

The Madison case is the most cited in the thread, but not the only one. Ashley, Meredith, Leslie, Aubrey, Kelly or Taylor have traveled the same road, and the result is almost always the same: boys disappear from the register.

Aubrey and Kelly: a song and a film are enough

In 1973 the band Bread released “Aubrey.” The song was supposedly about a woman. From then on the name increasingly stayed with girls, and today almost no boy is named Aubrey. With Kelly, during WWII and in the ’70s it was a clearly male name; the 1970 war film “Kelly's Heroes” captures it, and now it sounds directly female.

There is a repeating pattern: music, film and media fame act as a parallel civil registry. Kendall would be another recent example. The name existed among men, then came Kendall Jenner, she became globally famous, and in the last six or eight years the register has filled with girls named Kendall until boys were displaced. There are still parents who give it to a son, but the surrounding pressure has already reclassified it as unisensuni.

Leslie and Lesley: the spelling difference that decides gender

The Leslie case is the most instructive. It is a Scottish name —holly garden, according to its Gaelic etymology— and, as one participant argues, in the United Kingdom 85% of Leslies are still men. In the United States, when it began to be given to girls, the spelling was feminized: Leslie for boys, Lesley for girls. Except that many parents did not know how to spell it and wrote it the same way. The result, again according to that account, is that most American Leslies today are women because of an inherited spelling mistake.

Why the phenomenon is different in Spain

In Spanish there is grammatical gender, and that works as a barrier. Pepe becomes Pepa and the original is not confused. But the language is not watertight. Guadalupe, Trinidad, Cruz and Rosario are male names in much of Latin America and female names in Spain, as noted in the thread. The same happens with Camino, Pilar, Carmen, Rocío, Amparo or Lledó: grammatically masculine nouns turned into female names because they refer to a specific Marian invocation.

Another case cited is Eve. In Spain 8% of people with that name are men and in Germany 4%, according to a participant, because in Frisian it is unisensuni and because the -e ending sounds masculine to a Spanish-speaking ear. According to his interpretation, a registry official and a local tradition were enough.

Names used to be much more concentrated

It is worth measuring the phenomenon at its true scale. In the early 20th century, a top name in the United States could reach 5 or 6% of births. Today the number ones —Liam for boys, Olivia for girls— hover around 1%. The supply has multiplied like television channels.

Shelby illustrates it: it became fashionable for girls in 1990, became a top name and then fell. According to a calculation cited in the thread, in 2024 there were 50 boys and 450 girls named Shelby. A nine-to-one ratio. The name does not disappear: it changes sens.

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