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Crip Dyke's avatar

Good fucking god.

Some guy who works with LGBT youth gave an interview for context for that poor kid who was deadnamed IN THE YEARBOOK as a "prank" by some horrifying assgadgets.

His interview was sympathetic, 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.

It came from the stories of trans people murdered and dead by suicide where the media used a name on an old piece of paper that wasn't the name the person used when alive.

This idea of "the name people will use for me when I'm dead," 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.

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 took your life. Their reporting was the culmination of the erasure of your life, your living, your agency. Deadnaming was the institutions of this world choosing to side with your murderer. Deadnaming was your society preferring violent criminals to peaceful gender outsiders.

I get it that for teens today the threat of this is lessened 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.

Accidentally using an old name for someone you've known well for long before a transition is one thing. 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 isn't an uncomfortable reference to the past.

If you portray, as this interviewee did, deadnaming as solely about how the person deadnamed feels about their past, you strip the blame and responsibility from the attackers to the attacked. It's 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 was the final act of violence endured by the already dead.

You want to know where deadnaming came from? It came from cissexist rage.

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Crip Dyke's avatar

>> "No federal money for birth control (page 483). The government will push the “rhythm method” instead! (Obligatory to say, THE RHYTHM METHOD DOES NOT WORK.)" <<

Why do they keep pushing the rhythm method? They only lose credibility when people find out unexpectedly that it doesn't work. I mean, I get it, they're violently opposed to the pill, but as I understand it there's a natural form of birth control with a success rate over 96% (with strict adherence) which is comparable to the pill and doesn't require messing with god-given female fertility or risking an accidental failed-implantation of a 4 hour old fully fertilized human being.

It's called "𝒑𝒆𝒈𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒈". They should promote 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵.

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