In Defense of Deadnaming - Brendan O'Neill

[heresyandwitchcraft]

Brendan O'Neill's take on Graham Linehan, deadnaming, the trans activist vs feminist wars, Orwellian principles, and being able to utter facts.

It's pretty uncompromising (particularly when it comes to Graham's positions in the past), but I found it an excellent read. Thank you Mr O'Neill. We do need the free-speech defenders to get over their schadenfreude and the temptation to adopt a "the-left-is-eating-itself-so-leave-them-to-it" attitude:

Fine, have a laugh about that, get it out of your system. And then let’s get back to defending Linehan, because even people who don’t believe in freedom of speech must have their freedom of speech defended.

Linehan’s speechcrime was to be trans-sceptical – or ‘transphobic’, to use the word preferred by trans activists and their allies, which include the police, the military, the Church, the educational establishment, the academy, and virtually every single celebrity. Such an oppressed movement!

Linehan has been getting into online spats for months with trans activists. He agrees with those feminists who argue that making it easier for men to identify as women (even referring to them as men is a transphobic hate crime, I know) is not good for women.

....

So we have to defend Linehan. And we have to defend ‘deadnaming’. For ‘deadnaming’ is just a Newspeak word designed to demonise the telling of historical truths. Not satisfied with seeking to control contemporary discussion and attitudes, now trans activists and their allies (all institutions, in essence) want to control the past itself. History. No way. The past happened, it was true, and we should not allow that to be erased and forgotten just to make some people feel better about themselves.

www.spiked-online.com/2018/10/11/in-defence-of-deadnaming/

Linehan’s speechcrime was to be trans-sceptical – or ‘transphobic’, to use the word preferred by trans activists and their allies, which include the police, the military, the Church, the educational establishment, the academy, and virtually every single celebrity. Such an oppressed movement!

LOL!

ALL THE LOLS LANG 🔥🔥

This line summed it up for me:

"He believes such casual, fad-like self-identification reduces womanhood to a flimsy, easily adopted thing, like a piece of clothing, and threatens to throw open previously women-only spaces – from changing rooms to all-women shortlists in party politics — to people who have penises and the XY chromosomes."

There are so many passages in this piece that are immensely quotable:

He dared to refer to Stephanie as ‘he’ and he even ‘deadnamed’ her, which is when you use the name a trans person was given at birth rather than the opposite-gender name they gave themselves later in life. Using ‘deadnames’ is like saying ‘Voldemort’ in the Harry Potter universe: a serious no-no that risks conjuring up monsters (though Twitter haters and woke police officers rather than dark lords).

I wonder if the TRAs are going to go after the BBC for this blatant piece of deadnaming - and worse, dead-photoing?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-45825838

Was just about to quote the Voldemort line, Heresey
Definitely the he who shall not be named!
Great article.

Does that make (lowers voice to a whisper) a certain doctor... (looks behind shoulder)... a Death Eater in this analogy?

Deadnaming is just rude and spiteful and shows you have no respect for another human being. It's no different to doxing someone, and if you don't support that then you shouldn't support deadnaming a trans person.

The only reason to deadname someone would be to push a transphobic agenda, which people who post on here claim not to be. So they shouldn't support deadnaming someone

Pretending someone's previous name doesn't exist or never existed is re-writing basic facts. What someone has been called, and did when they had that name, can be incredibly relevant and therefore there cannot be an absolute ban on deadnaming.
If someone changes their name (such as a woman deciding to take on a different surname), we do not force everyone to forget their previous name or the things they did when known by that name.
Would I insist on calling Jane Fae by her dead-name John Ozimek to her face? No, but pretending both names don't refer to the same person, and ignoring all the writing they've done that are in the public record under a different name is, in my view, erasing history.

Pushing a transphobic agenda to point out that Karen White (just convicted of two rapes, 4 sex offences against women while in a female prison on remand) had an offending history as Stephen Wood that included gross indecency against children, indecent exposure and indecent assault?

Don't be silly. If it's 'transphobia' not to act to protect people like White, then frankly transphobia as a word has long since lost any meaning worth respecting. Bigger things for women to think about here than whether or not you think they're being a bit rude.

Semp - you say "po-tah-to", I say "po-tay-to", you say "deadnaming" I say "Stalinist airbrushing of history", "let's call the whole thing off..."
.
The airbrushing becomes particularly worrying when people are trying to use it to hide a past criminal history. Whether that's financial irregularities, violent offending or sexual offending (for instance convicted rapist Jessica Winfield appears to have managed to scrub Google of all references to Martin Ponting, the name Winfield used at the time he actually committed the raped.)

(Semp is almost proving Brendan's point, in their timely appearance on this thread?)

Correcting my mistake, sorry: Karen White, with two separate previous male identities and a long convictions sheet, convicted of three counts of rape against two victims, (one of the rape victims has attempted suicide since, according to the papers), admitted two sexual assaults on women prisoners, and allegedly informed prison staff that they could abuse a child and think nothing of it.

Semp

I totally support the premise of deadnaming both as a safeguarding measure , GRC or not, (in respect of CRB checks etc), and in relation to criminal convictions/investigations. The latter is especially important in cases of sexual violence especially towards women so any previous victims can come forward and seek justice or compound the conviction.

If you've got nothing to hide, the problem is what exactly? There's no transphobic agenda, just the protection of rights for women and children.

Oh btw - I'm actually transsexual, so please try and accuse me of transphobia..

TRANSITIONING DOES NOT ERASE YOUR HISTORY

Thanks Brendan. You spoke sense on Sky and now here.

TRANSITIONING DOES NOT ERASE YOUR HISTORY

Deadnaming is just rude and spiteful and shows you have no respect for another human being. It's no different to doxing someone, and if you don't support that then you shouldn't support deadnaming a trans person.

I wouldn't do it gratuitously. As previous posters have pointed out though, there are some circumstances in which it is important, even vital.
And actually, it is quite different from doxxing.

Whilst I wouldn't normally dare show my face in this topic, seeing Brendan O'Neill's article so well received I wondered if anyone had seen this: www.conservativewoman.co.uk/speak-out-now-against-this-stalinist-transgender-revolution/
'Despite all this, Theresa May’s government is going full steam ahead with her insane gender ‘reform’ plans even though only 18 per cent of voters support the reform.'

Much of the support you will receive is in the conservative (small c) and libertarian media.

The tide turns one trickle at a time.

Semp in most cases i'm sure you're right in day to day life it would definitely be rude and uncalled for. But like others are pointing out - wiping any connection with past identities shouldn't be possible when there is any public interest in connecting the two names.

@Manderleyagain the relevant bodies have access to that information, notably the police. In the UK there is no public right to know if someone is a convicted sex offender or not; that would be a whole other debate one aside from if the person is trans or not.

Plus if, god forbid, your children were to be abused the likelihood is that it would be by someone you know rather than a stranger.

‘Dead naming’ is sometimes ‘rude and spiteful’, but sometimes it is necessary to know somebody’s history. People change their names for all sorts of reasons, most commonly marriage, but also because they just don’t like their name. Unless somebody is in a witness protection programme, why should one group of people have more right to privacy than another?

Deadnaming is just rude and spiteful and shows you have no respect for another human being.

I have no respect for ‘Karen White’.

Why the fuck should I?

Great article. Misgendering as a concept is even more pernicious than deadnaming as it perpetuates the idea that you can actually change sex. Which you can’t. But let’s talk about misgendering and deadnaming and with enough threats and social pressure we can erase some unfortunate facts.

In the UK, I believe parents or those looking after children can ask if a person has a conviction for child sexual offenses. And another law allows for partners to be able to check domestic violence records. We also have the whole DBS system for employers to check criminal records, specifically because it is important to know a person's history for some jobs.

And let's be honest with ourselves, ANY parent or sane-thinking person would want to know if someone like Ian Huntley or another psychopathic dangerous offender was out in public and going by a new name/identity.

Semp, a thought experiment.
You've been attacked (God forbid) by someone.
You knew this offender by one name/gender.
You were too afraid to come forward at the time, or maybe the person disappeared before they got investigated properly.
Your attacker's face later appears on the news, and you definitely recognize them as the person who did the crime, but they are presenting with a different name/gender.
You could contact the police, but you'd have to "deadname" your attacker.
What do you do?
Can you now not speak of their old name or pretend that this same person wasn't the perpetrator?
Should you pretend the crime never happened?
Would it be transphobic to call the police and tell them what happened to you at the hands of this individual when they were going by their deadname?
What if releasing the old name is likely to get other victims to come forward?
What if the person is still out in the public, and might be using either their old or new name, in order to evade police?

In my view, the right thing to do would be exactly to link up the attacker's history with old/new names, and be honest about their record. If the criminal is not in custody, then it is strongly in the public interest also to release any aliases this person might be using. In any later criminal trial, you would also have to use deadnames in order to describe an accurate version of events.

So there are MANY non-transphobic reasons, I think, to justify deadnaming. Ranging from the simple (like how Wikipedia still says Bruce Jenner won the Olympic Men's Decathlon in 1976), to the more complex.

Because you still cannot erase history.