There’s a viral Twitter thread at the moment which is talking about how white nonbinary people should use Gaelic [sic] names because they’re Very Gender due to, idk, the vowels, and you have no idea how much fun I’m having correcting white Americans’ spelling and pronunciation of their super uwu gender ‘Gaelic’* Welsh names
Am I being a huge arsehole? Yes! We’re in a heatwave, and my fury runs hotter than the sun! But also, consider this: we do need to have a conversation about appropriation of chosen names, and the fact that taking names from other cultures that you blatantly know literally nothing about (see: thinking that Welsh is Gaelic, accidentally naming yourself ‘wine’) and arbitrarily deciding that it has super uwu gender vibes just because you can’t easily place it within your own cultural context is Bad Actually. While the original thread on Twitter had a good point that white nonbinary people (of which I am one) need to stop taking East Asian names, I think that all the people taking ‘Gaelic’ (again, [sic]) names are just part of the same problem, which is the idea that being a white queer person somehow gives you a license to appropriate other cultures based solely on Gender Vibes TM, and like… no. No, it does not.
The thing is, you don’t get to just take a name from another culture and reduce it solely to the gender and meaning you give it as an individual outside of that culture, because that name has very specific meanings and contexts in its place and culture of origin. You don’t get to treat names from other cultures and languages in a way that you wouldn’t treat names from your own cultural and linguistic context. If this sounds like I’m saying ‘don’t make [insert culture here] names gender neutral’, then let me clarify that I’m not saying that at all. On the contrary, it’s completely fine to de/re-gender a name! Names are just phonemes and orthography is a construct, just like gender! Call yourself whatever you like; I think de-gendering and re-gendering names is good and right and proper. Howevs, it’s not OK to do it solely on the basis of a name’s non-Anglo roots, or because a name’s perceived strangeness (or uniqueness) or difference make it seem or sound genderless to you. You not having an awareness of a name’s meaning does not mean it doesn’t have a meaning.
If you wouldn’t make, idk, Kaylynn or Roger or Paul gender neutral, then ask yourself why you view non-Anglo names as inherently more malleable and available to reinterpret. Call yourself what you want! Chosen names are very very valid and very important! Just make sure you know why you view certain names as Rigid And Untouchable And Inherently And Inexorably Gendered and other names as ripe for reinterpretation, because often that reason is Anglocentrism and colonialism. Eirlys and Aiko and Aoife and Saoirse and Ryu and Bryn are only gender neutral if Graham and Rachel and Oliver and Alan and Nancy and Luke are gender neutral, i.e. on the basis that all names can be divested from a specific gendered context, not just names that you perceive as being somehow ~mystical genderless otherworldly super gender uwu names~.
tl;dr if a name’s Gender Vibes rest solely on it being from another culture and therefore somehow Magic And Beyond All Concepts of Gender, then you need to reconsider why that is, and whether you’re just exoticising it and taking aesthetics from a culture without respecting its meaning and origin. ‘It looks cool’ is not a good enough reason to decide that you get to use a name and divest it of all context. If you’re going to use a name from another culture, then for fuck’s sake, learn how to spell and pronounce it and what it means, and make sure that you’re doing it out of respect.
(Also, pet peeve, but for the love of holy God, don’t just pick a name because you like its uwu mystical Celtic vibes and then spend your whole life mispronouncing it and telling everyone that it means some absolute bullshit like ‘fiery dragon’ or ‘elven princess’. We cri evrytiem. Plus, you’ll probably just end up calling yourself ‘wine’.)
*except Welsh is Brythonic, not Gaelic, lads, and words have meanings!
