Middle name? Not much help

Once upon a time, there was a farmer in Georgetown, Mass., or someplace close by. His last name was Eliot. Because he enjoyed an alcoholic beverage or three, he apparently took to hanging out with the Irish in Haverhill. There he met an Irish mill girl and married her, thus becoming my maternal great-great (or some such) grandfather. I suppose he was then run out of his home town on a rail. Thus Eliot is my middle name.

This is gender-neutral all right: most surname-first names are. I could go by "B. Eliot" and once tried it on my resume. As much as people screw around with gender-neutral names, few women adopt the trick of initialising their first name.

No, the problem is the Yankees. You see, it's Eliot spelled the "right" way. What they mean by that is that the Eliots (think Samuel Eliot Morison) are supposed to be the ones with birth and breeding. All those Elliots and Elliotts are shabby impostors.

Anytime my middle name comes up in old-money Yankee company, they begin asking genealogical questions that I'm quite unable to answer. This offends them, and they begin to act as if my grandmother stole the name along with a few pieces of their family silver. That in turn annoys me, so I offer a short version of the story above, emphasizing the alcoholic part. None of that advances the networking in any positive way.

The Boston Brahmins and such truck have one trick that we should all adopt in the name of gender neutrality: giving their kids three surnames instead of a traditional first name and surname-derived middle names. It's very gender neutral, for one thing. It helps the Brahmins sort you out without the trouble of asking after gender: if you don't have the right set of names and can't account for the ones you have (like Eliot) then you're dirt anyway. Let's have everyone do that, using any surname they like. That will level the playing field and save prospective parents from thralldom to the cute baby name cultists.

@MA: I did check out Jezebel. The most hilarious comment was from the woman named Stacey (fine surname name) who found out she was sharing her name with a porn star. So she changed it to Bryn without, it seems, doing any homework. She was stunned when a Bryn turned up as the hero in a Harlequin romance. We would have more equality and diversity if more Americans learnt to do their homework about such things. Never mind: it provides the world with an unending source of laughingstocks.

Feigning retreat in the name wars

So yes, yesterday's comment did have me pounding my head on the keyboard. As I ponder my teachable moment, I have to consider the several options the cited naming trend opens up.

The cool business of giving babies, of one of the principal genders, names connected with the other principal gender is very decidedly a one-way street. For instance, I doubt that my neighbour's daughter Ryan (a surname really, but never mind) will need to punch everyone's lights out to defend her name in grade school. If these people had a son, and named the child Jennifer, I guarantee that boy's fists would be busy from the moment he was able to stand. A Boy Named Sue was fiction. Until gender equality is real, giving girl babies boy names simply co-opts that name for the girls. The co-opted boy doesn't get tough. He gets fucked up, beaten up, or actually does die.

That's why a cute trend that enables gender-based bullying and youth suicide doesn't seem terribly cute to me, a person with an unusual name being steadily co-opted. Celebrities don't concern themselves with such details, because they don't seem to concern themselves with other human beings at all.

OK, I've lost this fight. I ain't quitting, as they say, but I've surrendered and I'm looking over my options.

Option 1. Move back to Wales, or New Zealand, or a few other parts of the former empire less afflicted with celebrititis, where the range of available names is wider than it is in the bible-toting US of A.

Option 2. Assimilate. (This is the preferred solution of the job-hunt gurus, by the way.) Go to court and change my name to Bryan-Byron-Byrne (I can toss a coin to choose). When I've done that, I should also adopt a red-blooded American nickname—say, Butch or Buzz— and use that on my resume.

Option 3 has the greatest appeal. If someone has been blessed with a gender-neutral or gender-ambiguous name, I think they should take that as licence to be gender-neutral or gender-ambiguous. Since adults are useless in such matters during one's formative years, the gender-ambiguous child may want to consider recruiting a bodyguard.

If celebrities take it upon themselves to enhance the ambiguity of your name, remember that celebrities are authority figures too, in their fatuous way. You must keep control of the situation and stay one step ahead of them

You might even parlay your gender neutral identity into a celebrity of your own. This would not be a cop-out, if you used your position to make gender equality something more than lip service. Only then would a name become just a name, and not an immutable signpost of gender identification.