Gender and names in : Ashley/Leslie-type drifts

How names do gender — unisex drifts, legal sex-marking and the difference between a file category and a person. Most official baby-name files still publish separate lists by recorded sex. That is a statistical convenience and a social story: it treats gender as a binary column beside a string.

A unisex name is a string that appears in more than one of those columns, or that moves from one to the other over decades (Leslie, Ashley, and others in English-language history). This page is about how names mark, leak and refuse gender. It is not about predicting personality from a gendered etymology.

A given name used for more than one gender in a community or file. Wikipedia’s “Unisex name” is the hero article for this topic. Some English names have drifted in SSA history (e.g. Ashley toward girls in late-20th-century U.S. files). That is a dated pattern, not a law. Because registration forms did. The split makes unisex research extra work and makes non-binary people statistically awkward.