I regret the name I gave my son – it was unique at the time but now everyone assumes he’s a girl
A TEEN mom says she regrets the name she gave to her now-teenage son – and she’s even urged him to legally change it.
TikTok user CassDamm thought she was giving her baby boy a unique family name when she gave birth years ago, but the name has since exploded in popularity – for little girls.
Cass said sarcastically that when she was pregnant at 16, she was at “peak maturity level here, definitely someone who should be naming a child.”
“When you have a baby when you’re 16, they really let you name that baby. Even though you’re a child having a child, they let you name that baby,” she went on.
Her son is now a teenager, and she would be more than happy for him to change his name legally: “I promise you, the day he decides he wants to get rid of it, I will be running to file the paperwork,” she said.
She first saw the name she picked on her family tree as the name of a great, great, great grand-uncle.
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“I was like, that’s different, I’m 16, I don’t know what I’m doing, so I’m gonna name my kid this,” she said, adding that she thought she was “picking a responsible name.”
Using her grandmother’s maiden name for a middle name, she landed on Ainsley Oliver.
“When I named him Ainsley, it was not a common name at all. I had never met somebody or heard of anybody else with that name,” she said.
“However, in the last few years, the name Ainsley has blown up in the United States as a female name, so there is a ton of girls named Ainsley.”
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Now, “anytime I tell somebody his name is Ainsley, everybody thinks that I have a daughter,” she said. “So I’m constantly like, ‘Nope, it’s a boy.'”
According to data from the U.S. Social Security Administration, there were 840 girls named Ainsley in 2021, making it the 363rd most popular name in the country.
It peaked in popularity in 2013 with 973 baby girls.
Meanwhile, there is no point since the year 1900 that Ainsley was in the top 1,000 names for boys in the U.S.
“And let me tell you, that boy makes sure that I gotta remember that every day of my life,” she went on.
Though her son goes by “Anz” on social media, he insists on keeping Ainsley as his full name.
“Every year I ask that kid, ‘Hey, you wanna change your name? You wanna go by your middle name? Let’s get rid of this. Let’s get rid of what I did to you when I was 16,'” she said.
“And it’s an absolute no. No, he’s making me live with that choice that I made.”
In an unfortunate twist, the mom later found out that “Ainsley Townsend” wasn’t her great, great, great grand-uncle after all, and that one of her ancestors had lied about his identity.
Commenters have been supportive, with some suggesting he go by Oliver and others saying Ainsley is a male name in the UK.
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“I love Ainsley it’s sad that the world is just too small-minded to think names can’t be unisex,” wrote one.
Cass replied: “The comment section on here is very supportive. In real life, 100% I am constantly talked down to by grown adults over it.”