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I love the range of opinions we get on this board, and I'm cool with it. I certainly wouldn't claim to have any kind of expertise on names in general; I guess Tristan is just one of the ones I feel strongly about.

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I think it's a little odd that you met/came across only female Tristans for however long, given that I've never even heard of one, but hey. Weirder things have happened. I imagine that if I was suddenly informed that something I'd always thought was a female name was actually masculine it'd be pretty strange.

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Everyone has names that they think are too soft or too hard, or don't fit. I'll never quite be able to get my head around Leto being feminine, for instance. I'm sorry if I overreacted; it's just that Tristan happens to be one that I literally never imagined could be feminine until relatively recently. All the associations I have are male.

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Also, because I have Wikipedia open:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan - Sir Tristan

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_and_Iseult - The romance of Tristan and Iseult

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out of which have been made

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_und_Isolde - The Wagner opera

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_%26_Isolde_%28film%29 - The film with James Franco in it

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I can't say I'm much of an opera fan and I've yet to see the film, but the story of Tristan and Iseult (or Yseult, or Isolde, or Isond) is one of my favourite stories from the King Arthur corpus. Sir Tristan is a wonderful character.