Amber gets the red light as name for a boy

FRENCH authorities have refused to let a couple name their newborn boy Amber because the child might suffer from unclear sexual identity.

Amber – or Ambre in French – joins Nutella, Strawberry and Manhattan on a growing list of names deemed unsuitable and potentially damaging by the French courts.

The baby’s female parents, who live in the Morbihan department of Brittany, had him in January.

But when they went to register his birth, the registrar reported them to the prosecutor in the town of Lorient, who decided that as Ambre – a rare name in France – was usually associated with girls, the risk of confusion over the boy’s sex might harm him.

The parents were summoned to a family court. The judge said she saw no grounds for forcing them to change the name but the prosecutor appealed, so the baby’s name will remain in limbo at least until April.

“Society is very unfair,” one of the boy’s mothers, Alice Gondelle, told France Bleu Radio. “It allows ridiculous first names like ‘Clitorine’.

“I wonder why it is that a name as classic and ancient [as Ambre] can’t get through and it is the state that is attacking us in the courts?”