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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/ab2twt on 2023-09-08 13:23:31.

I (37M) have 2 children, my son who is 13 and my daughter who is 15. My wife was the one who came up with the names for our kids, as I never had strong opinions on a baby name, my wife decided to name our son after her great grandfather, I never questioned it and never bothered to learn more about him, which looking back was probably a mistake.

A few months ago, our son was at a party with his friends from baseball, and they were sharing tiktoks with each other, one of the boys shared a tik tok about an “almost name” (basically, like it sounds, what your parents almost named you), one of my son’s friends asked about my son’s names and he mentioned who he was named after. The boy decided to type the name into google and was scrolling through results until he found something interesting.

My wife’s great grandfather was a state legislator in the Southern US before the civil rights era. As you may have guessed from that, he was a segregationist and voted in favor of bills to maintain segregation.

When we picked our son up from the party, he started to yell at us and we had to calm him down. He asked why we would name him after a bad guy like his great grandpa. This started some arguing in the car and when we got home later that night, we discussed it. Our son told us he talked to his friends and he was changing his name, and that was final. My wife was a bit upset, she grew up here in the south when I’m originally from a hippie little town in New England. My wife has become a lot more accepting since we met, but this was still a bit hard for her, she eventually accepted it though and moved on.

We now refer to a name chosen by our son with the help of his friends, his classmates at school have started to use it and while he’s had some issues, it hasn’t been terrible. One of my son’s friends is a trans boy and he has had it worse, though my son and his other friends always work on protecting the boy from bullying.

My son’s new name is one he’s proud of and named after someone he looks up to. Recently he got some items with his new name, like a men’s necklace and a sign in his room.

The issue is, a few days after he got the items with his new name (which was 2 weeks ago), our daughter went and ruined them, by breaking the chain on the necklace and banging his sign. Our daughter doesn’t like the name change, saying her brother is just being a “sensitive zoomer” and something about boys being too “weak” these days. Our daughter has said “edgy” stuff like this in the past year or so, even when we condemn her. As a result of the damage, my wife and I told her we were suspending her allowance until the price of the damages were paid back. Our daughter is saying we are being unfair to her, and has apologized for what she did. My wife went on her facebook mom’s group to ask for help and most of the moms agreed we were too hard on her. AITA?