Girls Will Be Boys and Boys Will Be Girls

I have a Dilemma: thanks to the amazing wonders of email and the total lack of a need for face-to-face or phone-to-phone communication, one of the freelance editors I work with via the Evil Desk Job thinks I'm a Boy.

This Dilemma is entirely caused by the gender neutrality of my Given Name: Robin. It's spelled like the bird but also like the traditional boy spelling because I am, in fact, named after my Very Handy Father. His name is Robert, but here's the catch: so is my grandfather's. So my grandparents used to call my dad Robin. Which he hated. At about age 13, he stopped answering to it and started only answering to Rob, which worked pretty well, but my Yankee Grammy still called him Robin half the time. Then I came along, and what better way to make your family stop calling you an Unfortunate Nickname but to bestow said Unfortunate Nickname upon your child? People routinely respond to this Named-After-My-Father scenario with “Oh! How Southern of your family!” to which I have to reply over and over again, “No, not really. My dad's side of the family is from Massachusetts. It was more a matter of convenience.”

In my whole life I have known only two boy Robins (excluding fictional ones like Christopher Robin or Robin the Boy Wonder or Brave, Brave Sir Robin, or famous ones like Robin Williams). I know four other girl Robins, three of whom I met in college and one who I just met last year. After we moved from Massachusetts to Alabama, I became the only Robin in the entire Fairhope public school system, a status that I retained until my senior year when another little girl Robin turned up in the first grade.

The fact that my name is somewhat uncommon has never really bothered me—I've gotten so used to it that I'm actually surprised when I meet another Robin. I can't really fathom what it would be like to know lots of other people with my name. Weird, I think. I mean, I already have a hard time if I'm in the same room with a Rob or a Robert because when people call out a name to get your attention, they really only emphasize that first syllable, so of course I turn around and of course I'm not the person they're talking to, which bugs me. I can only imagine what it would be like to have that happen all the time. Still, maybe I wouldn't care so much if I had a more common name like Julie or Stephanie or Jennifer if it meant that people wouldn't confuse me for a boy.

And the thing is, not even my middle name helps people out of this one: Lee. Spelled like the boy's name. Again. This one I have to thank my Very Dramatic Mother for, since it's her middle name, too, and it got handed to me like some heirloom quilt. Actually, it was my Southern Grandmother's idea—my Very Dramatic Mother had wanted to call me Robin Maria. I'm not sure what would have been better given those two choices. On the one hand, Robin Lee makes my name entirely gender neutral except for the fact that it hearkens back to a Rather Famous Southern General from the days of the “War of Northern Aggression,” as my eighth grade history teacher called it. On the other hand, Robin Maria, while very comfortably female, makes me sound either somewhat Latina or rather like one of Columbus's ships.

To compound the naming issues, we might as well add to all of this the fact that I have always had nicknames. Certainly the most common are Rob, Robs, and Robbie/Robby. Those that developed on their own through various circumstances too numerous to go into are Robina, Robino, the Great Robini (pronounced like Houdini, which became Bini for short), Robiña, Robinski (shortened to Binski), Bin, Robsy, Bobsy, and Bobbin. And just yesterday—in light of the Current Dilemma with said gender-confused freelancer editor—one of my workmates dubbed me Robinetta.

Of course, this freelancer is definitely not the first to confuse me for someone with a Y chromosome. I know it happened occasionally throughout grade school, but the issue really came to light when I started receiving college recruitment literature addressed to “Mr. Robin Lee ———.” Southern Methodist University was, in fact, so determined that I was a boy that they continued sending application literature to Mr. Robin even after I called to correct them. I didn't apply apply to Southern Methodist University. I routinely get magazine and credit card offers addressed to Mr. Robin. The World Wildlife Federation thinks I'm a guy, but a guy who cares about saving baby seals and who occasionally orders WWF checks with pictures of whales and polar bears and deer.

But as to my Current Dilemma: this is a whole new realm of gender confusion. Here is a person with whom I correspond fairly regularly via email, querying about jobs, answering editorial questions, passing invoices back and forth. Here is a person with whom I have a sort of working relationship, who has been laboring under the mistaken impression that this Robin Lee who sends her work is actually a Mr. Robin Lee and not a Ms. Part of me was more than a little taken aback by this realization. “I mean, how can she think I'm a boy?!” I asked my fellow Team Editorial member, Mr. Reliable. “I use exclamation points and smiley faces in practically every email!”

Mr. Reliable just grinned and rubbed his beard and shook his head. “Man. I don't know. I don't usually think of Robin as a guy's name.”

And then there was the question of what I should do about it. Did I correct her and make her feel foolish? Well, it wasn't that big of a deal. I mean, her confusion was Understandable, sort of. It's not like she did it On Purpose.

“Maybe in my next email I'll just drop a line about my husband,” I said to my friend and one of our project managers, the Keeper of the Perpetual Candy Dish. I was standing in her office, eating the cherry Jolly Rancher she offered me in consolation.

Candy looked at me for a second, “Well, that could work, but if she already thinks you're a guy . . .” She let the sentence hang there until—

“Shit! You're right! She might just think I'm a gay boy-Robin. Well, damn, that won't work.”

Clearly, I was Stuck.

Or more correctly, I am Stuck. I still have not resolved this issue. I spent the rest of the work day yesterday writing emails and trying to read them as though they were from a boy—I don't sound like a boy when I write—or trying to work out clever ways to insert the fact that I am a women into the closing lines of my correspondence—From one woman to another? No, that sounds like a self-help columnist. Women of the Editing World Unite? No, too socialist. Maybe Mrs. Robinetta Lee? No, that makes me sound like I'm 80 . . .

I guess the thing that amuses me the most about my Dilemma is how much I am alternately bothered by it and intrigued by it. Of course anyone can be anything they want to be thanks to technology—I could go online and paint myself as a middle-aged retired footballer who raises cockatiels—but the thing that gets me is that I wasn't even trying. I'm a Nonfiction Writer, for the love of Pete! I don't make stuff up because I don't have to because there's so much Good Real Stuff to write about already. But here is someone who's made up a fake Robin to stand in my place—a Not Me. A Boy Me. I could be a boy to this woman forever. What then? Should I change how I write my emails to her? Should I become more of what I would perceive as manly or boyish? How the hell does one write emails like a boy anyway? Wouldn't that just be perpetuating some skewed myth of gender appropriate language or behavior? What does she think of my ☺and !!!? That I'm gay? Because only women and gay men use excessive punctuation and emoticons, clearly. How narrow minded of her to think that. But wait, does she? How narrow minded of me to think that she thinks that. Wait, am I irritated that she thinks that I'm a guy or am I now irritated that she thinks that I'm a guy and she assumes I'm gay???

Ow. See? This is what happens when a few Feminist Theory classes from Grad School meet up with a Real Life Gender Debacle.

Screw it. I think I'll put on some make up, curl my hair, and maybe go buy Something Pink.