Apparently Even People Who Work With LGBT Youth Have Forgotten What Deadnaming Is.
Content Warning: murder, suicide, and hatred that won't stop after death. Don't read this until you're ready.
Good fucking gravy.
Some guy who works with LGBT youth gave an interview for context for the story of that poor kid who was deadnamed in the yearbook as a "prank" by some horrifying assgadgets.
His interview was sympathetic, I don’t mean to imply that he was the problem or that he wasn’t trying to advocate for trans youth, but he gave this bullshit fake etymology about where the term "deadname" comes from. Said it was just a colloquialism for "that person is dead to me" meaning one's past self.
For those curious: that's not where it comes from at all. And if it was? It should be the work of people who work with trans youth to undermine and destabilize that meaning. I don’t want kids to come through their childhoods so traumatized that they can’t even acknowledge a continuum between who they were and what they experienced and the person they are today. That’s not what deadnaming was created to convey, and to the extent that that is how it’s used now, that should stop.
The origin was about something much worse than a personal feeling of separation or dissociation. The word came from the stories of trans people murdered and dead by suicide where the media consistently used a name taken from an old piece of paper that wasn't the name the person chose while alive. Newspapers believing anything and anyone to be the expert on trans lives except trans people themselves is just the start of what this word means.
This need for crafting the idea "the name people will use for me when I'm dead," into a single word came out of anguish at how hate crimes against trans people were frequently committed to attack a person's transness or gender itself. Trans women have had their breasts mutilated and their genitals stabbed repeatedly -- over and over and over until they are unrecognizable. Ah, but that was not the end. Even bleeding out between one’s legs was not the end.
The true horror of deadnaming was that when the media reported your former name, they were acting as an accomplice to the violent person who murdered you. Their reporting was the culmination of the erasure of your life, your living, your agency. Deadnaming was the moment the institutions of this world chose to side with your murderer. Deadnaming was your society’s announced preference for violent criminals over peaceful gender outsiders.
I get it that for teens today the threat of this is lessened — both the threat of murder and the threat that you will be immortalized using a name you left behind — and the word may not have the same horrifying connotations, but deadnaming is still an act of stripping of agency, a cousin to rape and murder, once removed.
Accidentally using an old name for someone you've known well for long before a transition is one thing. Some people will call that deadnaming, but as a trans person who came of age in 1990 before the word had circulated I can tell you that it isn’t.
Deliberately and permanently labelling someone in the yearbook with a name they never used at your high school, that they hadn't used for three years, that is an act of hatred. That’s putting the old name indelibly to the page, announcing to the world a hostility to the agency and even to the existence of the trans person you dislike because they are trans. That isn't an uncomfortable reference to the past. It is an attack.
If you portray, as this interviewee did, deadnaming as solely about how the person deadnamed feels about the time lived before maturing into their own power, you strip the blame and responsibility from the attackers and attach it to the attacked. It's suddenly not about the violent person slamming a knife down overhand, it's about how you have never been entirely comfortable with steel penetrating your chest.
Deadnaming is not an accidental slip. Deadnaming is erasure. Deadnaming is choosing to ally with those who would end all trans people if they could.
Deadnaming is the final act of violence endured by the already dead.
You want to know where deadnaming came from? It came from cissexist rage.
PREVIOUSLY:
This should be mandatory reading for anyone who works with youth. Because if you work with youth, even if you don't realize it, you work with LGBT youth.
Fuck man. This really took my breath away. How can people so casually do this shit.