Stop Calling It ‘Deadnaming’

Through the use of apocalyptic language, activists have stigmatized any discussion of biological reality as a dangerous—even murderous—form of abuse.

“Elon Musk’s Twitter Removes Protections For Trans Users In New Policy,” is the headline that Forbes put on its April 18 article about recent amendments to Twitter’s “hateful conduct policy.” Under the new rules, users will no longer be punished for “deadnaming” transgender-identified individuals. So, by way, of example, one can now mention that the 2007 film Juno starred Ellen Page, an actress who later in life began self-describing as a man called Elliot. In the very unlikely event that I ever meet Page, I would use Page’s new name as a matter of courtesy, much as I would avoid saying “David” to address a friend of mine who wants everyone to call him “Dave.” But the idea that it is hate speech to use a person’s real historical former name to describe who they were in the past has always been ludicrous—just as ludicrous as insisting that it’s hate speech to refer to Yusuf Islam as someone who once went by the name Cat Stevens or Steven Demetre Georgiou.

According to the OED, the word “deadname” has been around since 2010. And its widespread adoption since that time has encouraged the quasi-religious idea of transition representing a sort of born-again experience, whereby trans people escape the inauthentic soul-dead husk of “cis” existence. The necrotic overtones conjured by the word also support the conceit that acts of misgendering—or even any failure to reflexively “affirm” a child’s suddenly expressed insistence that they were “born in the wrong body” (another supernatural notion)—are metaphorically equivalent to homicide. This dovetails with those various overwrought slogans to the effect that gender dissidents (which is to say, anyone who brings up the ideologically inconvenient reality of human biology) are literally “denying the existence” of trans people, and even driving them to suicide.

As many others have noted, there is something profoundly manipulative about these word choices. Threatening suicide as a way to win an argument is the sort of pressure tactic that many women have learned to associate with pathological narcissists seeking to prevent a girlfriend from walking away.

Moreover, there’s a plain contradiction here, since all of this lurid death-soaked rhetoric suggests that the self-image of trans people is so fantastically fragile that even a glancing mention of their actual personal histories and biological identities will sap every ounce of their emotional lifeblood. This suggestion flies directly against the equally popular activist claim that gender identity is the unshakable bedrock of human identity—and that trans people know themselves to be trans with all the certainty that a scientist knows the earth to be round.

In her excellent 2022 book, 18 Months: A Marriage Lost to Gender Identity, American author Shannon Thrace described how her husband not only began claiming to be a woman, but also created a completely fictionalized past—a past in which he “always knew” that he was internally female. These stories are becoming more common—often being told by wives such as Shannon, who must emotionally babysit middle-aged men who collapse into tears and deliver maudlin, self-pitying orations whenever someone shows them a picture of the boy they once were in grade school.

This desperate need to create a fake history that conforms to one’s newly announced gender hardly suggests confidence about one’s true self. If “Edward” can’t abide a single mention of once having been Edwina, maybe Edwina isn’t quite so departed from this earth as the reborn Edward loudly claims.

Of course, people reinvent themselves all the time, in all sorts of ways. It’s part of the human adventure. But this is the only common kind of reinvention that requires the falsification—or at least the censoring—of history.

I know several people who have become extremely religious in their middle-aged years, including a few born-again Christians. The suggestion that no one can ever mention their pre-Christian lives would be preposterous to them. In fact, many religious proselytizers positively love talking about their sinful pasts, whose ungodly nature they contrast with their newly observant personas. (“I was once like you, my brother, living life in the service of earthly sin…”) Much of Christian literature, going back at least to Augustine of Hippo, is informed by this theme. It’s only in cults that revisiting one’s pre-conversion past is seen as inherently traumatic.

If you’ve ever been to a wedding (or other public act of celebration) involving a devotee of this movement, you may have been pressured to become performatively complicit in its rites. I have in mind one wedding (whose details I will blur sufficiently so as to completely anonymize the participants) between two lesbians in their early 30s—an unexceptional event in a socially progressive place such as Canada, except to such extent that, in this case, one of the partners had recently discovered that she wasn’t really a lesbian called Christina, but in fact was a man called Christopher.

Moreover, since Christopher’s attraction to women remained unaffected by this gender epiphany, both members of this lesbian couple now insisted (with a straight face) that they had suddenly become heterosexual—on the pretense that this was, well and truly, a union of man and woman. Not so long ago, this sort of renunciation of gay identity was encouraged by the homophobic pseudoscience known as “conversion therapy.” In 2023, the same process flies under the banner of “gender affirmation.” It’s one reason (of many) that many LGB people are starting to scrape the T off their bumper stickers.

Family members at this event also had their assigned scripts. As at many such celebrations, there were two tables where treasured photos and mementos from the past were displayed. Angela’s table was crowded with everything from baby shoes to prom photos to a framed post-grad diploma. Christopher’s table, on the other hand, had been sanitized of any object or document that predated the transition—and so most of what it contained were images of a joyless, stern-faced Christopher attending recent trans-rights marches and such. Friends and relatives who delivered speeches were given strict instructions, dutifully observed, to avoid any reference to events in Christopher’s life predating the moment of trans rebirth. To hear these speeches was to imagine that Angela was marrying someone who’d been deposited on planet earth just a few years ago.

Attendance at trans weddings isn’t a regular occurrence for most of us. But a capsule version of this kind of mummer’s farce unfolds every time we’re called upon to use maudlin neologisms such as “deadname.” Trans people deserve all the rights that everyone else enjoys—including the right to emotionally inhabit fantasy worlds of their own construction, whether as part of a religion, cult, ideological movement, or Dungeons & Dragons role-playing campaign. But the rest of us have no obligation to serve as NPCs in these imaginary milieus. And Twitter’s new policy will help us reject demands that we do so.