What’s in a Name?

Written by Joni Roberts

Traveler, storyteller, and public health advocate

My name, Joni (Joe knee), is often mispronounced as Johnny in cultures where English is not the first language, and the long O does not exist in their language.

A simple enough mistake: short o for long o, and the cultural difference of knowing only men with the name Johnny so anything close must be a male name. I am constantly misgendered from country to country.

But Greece takes the cake. When people couldn’t figure out if I were male or female they went with “Sir/Madam.” But after seeing me, it’s like they glitched and couldn’t process that a woman in front of them was named Johnny. (Truth be told, my name is Joni but I digress.)

It got so bad that some just started calling me by my last name. And the best one of all? Someone just called me by my room number.

What was going on here?

• Gendered name associations are deeply ingrained, so anything close to “Johnny” defaults to male.

• Accents and vowel sounds make “Joni” nearly impossible to distinguish in some languages.

• Once someone believes they’ve “heard” a name, it’s nearly impossible to convince them otherwise.

  
  

Even when I corrected folks, their brains could not make sense of what I shared.

It reminds me of a woman in the U.S. who asked me my name. I said Joni. She said, “Oh Johnny.” I corrected her: “No, Joni.” Again she said, “Yeah Johnny.” At this point I felt like a character in a comedy sketch.

It makes me wonder: what do these same people think of Joni Mitchell? Is she also Johnny Mitchell? Surely not.

And yet, when it comes to me, their minds simply cannot compute. I could travel under my middle name, use the common Jamaican name Jodi (another option I get called), or even invent a simpler one just for these moments, but that would feel like erasing part of my identity.

So I keep pushing through, teaching people that other names exist, and that yes—women named Joni exist too. Maybe it takes more effort, but at least I don’t have to answer to “room 204” for the rest of my travels.

Notes closed. Back to correcting introductions, one conversation at a time. Love people-watching too? Join the journey and get Field Notes in your inbox.