Names go through fads and cycles in popularity. If you pick a name that's popular right now, it may seem funny as applied to a woman born several decades before the name became popular.
My birth name was Andrew, which comes from the greek word meaning "manly." Isn't that a laugh riot! While I was in high school, most people considered me to be a gay boy. That made sense according to the way people understood gender identity at the time. I was a slender, somewhat swishy boy who sometimes wore eye makeup or girly clothes. I was mostly attracted to boys, except for the biggest crush of my life, a lesbian two years older than me. (But she's a whole 'nother story!) So the conclusion that I was gay was reasonable, even though I knew even back then that there was more going on inside me.
In college, I sorted out a lot of my feelings and came to understand myself as m to f trans. Like a lot of us, I assumed an internal name that corresponded to my gender identity. I wanted to stay with an "A" name. Thinking back over my school years, I remembered that there would often be girls named April in my classes, so that's what I chose. I didn't want some exotic name; I wanted a name that might well have been given to me at the time if I had been born a girl.
The Social Security Administration (which maintains records on the names and birth dates of hundreds of millions of people) compiles year-by-year lists of the frequency of names parents give to newborn boys and girls. For 1981, April was the 25th most common name for girls (pretty high up on the list), which is why I often ran into girls named April during my school years. By the way, "manly" Andrew was the 18th most common name for boys that same year.
So I adopted April as my internal name about 15 years ago, and the name started gradually coming out in the open as my gender identity began to unfold. I was sometimes socializing and dating crossdressed, going by April when I did that. As I started serious transition efforts, I legally changed my name and brought my documents into line with my new reality.
So I'm April now, and "manly" Andrew is just history.
A recommendation: If you're thinking about adopting a new name, check the Social Security records on name frequency and you can see how likely such a name was in various years. If your ultimate objective is to blend in seamlessly into a female identity, it makes sense that you would use a name people would naturally associate with a woman of your age. It works for me!
