“Karen” is going extinct.
This year, only one baby was named Karen in the entirety of the United Kingdom.
Blame it, of course, on the once-popular name becoming a slur for a certain type of middle-aged white woman — one who is stereotypically brash, rude, racist and loves complaining to store or restaurant managers. Oh, and she often has a bad haircut.
No wonder women who have lived with the name Karen for decades are now ditching it.
“As someone named Karen, when you go home and turn on the TV or go on the internet, you’re as likely as not to see your name being misused,” Karen Taylor, a 56-year-old small business owner, told The Post. “You walk around with a tag that says ‘racist.’”
She’s constantly seen her name dragged through the mud since mocking Karen memes went viral in 2020. While vacationing in Florida, she spotted a “No Karens” sign at a bar and once canceled her order at a local coffee shop that sold “No Karens” stickers.
“I’m not the sort of person who goes around looking to be a victim,” said Taylor, who asked to withhold the name of her town and business lest haters come after her. “I wouldn’t be talking about this if it were just an annoyance. It’s just something that I can’t escape.”
By May of 2020, she’d finally had enough and started going by a new name of Gaelic origin. Now, she’s in the process of legally changing her name and officially leaving Karen behind.
“It took me a couple of sleepless weeks to decide I had to change my name,” she said. “Karen is a great name, and being forced to give up your name — the first thing your parents gave you — is a big deal.”
Taylor’s parents are both deceased, but she thinks her name change is something they would have approved of as Jewish Americans with a family history of changing names to avoid discrimination. “Some parents are crushed, but I tend to think of it as something my parents would have understood.”
Still, she’s keeping her new name and her location private over harassment concerns — and a wish to cut ties with her old Karen identity entirely.
“Anything connected with the name is a target for harassment these days,” Taylor explained. “My whole goal in changing my name is to escape being unfairly and inaccurately labeled with all of the negative qualities that are being poured onto my name. I don’t want them to follow me now.”
Until just a couple of years ago, Karen was an innocuous name, derived from a Greek word meaning “pure,” and once so popular that it was given to nearly 2% of girls born in the mid-1950s.
But things changed in 2005, when comedian Dane Cook took a shot in a standup routine, declaring, “Every group has a Karen, and she is always a bag of douche.” The joke took off on Reddit and made inroads in the black community as a catchall moniker for problematic white women.
It burst into common usage in May 2020, when the country was reckoning with race following the murder of George Floyd. Suddenly the name took on a connotation with racist micro-aggressions.
That’s also when Amy Cooper, who made headlines for calling the police on a black birdwatcher, became known as the “Central Park Karen.” The following month, Mark and Patricia McCloskey — who brandished guns as Black Lives Matter protesters marched by their St. Louis home — were dubbed “Ken and Karen McCloskey.” Then there was the San Francisco couple who called police about a neighbor stenciling a BLM message of support on his own property.
“‘Karen’ lies and says she knows that I don’t live in my own house, because she knows the person who lives here,” tweeted the neighbor, Jaime Juanillo.
Urban Dictionary definitions of “Karen” include everything from “a blonde woman … who wants to speak to the manager” to someone who “[strives] to make the lives of others miserable — especially the lives of minimum-wage workers,” and even “a f**king b**ch that only feels anger and will not rest until her wrath is felt across the entire BigLots, Walmart, Target, etc.”
This year, “Karen” was the most-searched slang term according to QuillBot.
Which is bad news for Karen Gross, an author and educator from Massachusetts who had hoped that the meme would be a passing fad.
“Initially I thought it was a fad that would go away,” the 70-year-old told the Post. “Then I started seeing articles in reputable publications about the meme — using it as a platform to discuss white privilege and rude and socially obnoxious behavior. I realized it had a stickiness.”
In 2020, the Atlantic went as far as to call then-president Trump “The Karen in Chief.” Domino’s Pizza in Australia and New Zealand ran a promo offering free pizza to “nice Karens” — then issued an apology after critics said they were “rewarding privilege.”
Suddenly people were poking fun at Gross’s name and stereotyping her constantly.
“The assumption by people, considering that I am named Karen, is that I stand for white privilege and have a disregard for other people,” she told The post. “That is not true.”
So, Gross decided to distance herself from the name, which she said she had never loved in the first place. First, she considered changing the spelling to Karin or Caren, but she ultimately decided on just going by “K.”
She’s also speaking out about how a demeaning joke can do real damage.
“I’m sending a message about the power of memes and why we should be concerned about homogenizing everybody with a certain name in a negative way,” she said. “As an educator, I saw that happening all the time with children. We should be cautious about how we tease people and harass them over their names. It isn’t a joke. It’s serious business.”
In fact, it’s such serious business that Karen-centric support groups, Karens United and Karen is my Name, have popped up across the internet.
One online forum has upwards of 2,000 members and is filled with stories of stigma: a grocery store cashier who says people look at her name tag and say they feel sorry for her; an artist who was dropped from a gallery after she refused the owner’s request that she not sign her work as Karen; and even an author whose publisher asked her not to use her name.
New York City-based author Abbott Kahler — formerly known as Karen Abbott — knows just how powerful names can be in her industry. When the Karen meme took over in 2020, she was immediately concerned about how it might impact her career.
“I took notice of the meme, and it was of course very upsetting and distressing, especially since my name is so tied to my work as a writer,” Kahler, 49, told the Post.
Coincidentally, she had already legally changed her name to Abbot Kahler by the time the Karen pejorative took off, out of a desire to give herself a new, distinct moniker as she pivoted from writing non-fiction books to fiction. But her publisher had insisted that, for the sake of continuity and name recognition, she continued to publish as Karen.
But when the Karen meme took off, the publisher relented.
“I made another plea to go by my actual legal name,” she said. “Maybe if the meme hadn’t been so prevalent I wouldn’t have been successful. I don’t know if it’s because of the connotations the name has now, but they’re suddenly acquiescing.”
Kahler has two books coming out in 2024, and she’ll officially shed her Karen identity — both professionally and personally.
Even though the author had already been agitating for change, she finds it disturbing that her original name has morphed into a slur.
“It’s really a shame,” she said. “Karen was a perfectly fine name for many decades. People should just use the words they actually mean. If they want to call someone a spoiled, entitled white woman, just call her that. If you want to insult somebody, use precise language, not someone’s name.”