Deadnaming is the practice of calling someone by a name they no longer go by.
A common trivia question might be who is Marion Morrison or who is Reginald Dwight? Stage names like John Wayne and Elton John are common in the entertainment world. And yet, when Prince died and several people in the media announced that ‘Prince Nelson’ had died, I found this totally offensive. Prince is Prince, full stop. If Price couldn’t keep from being deadnamed, what do you really think your chances are?
The media likes to deadname people, because using aliases is usually the practice of criminals and con artists. The first time I noticed this practice was when I was reading about Ramtha, a New Age guru from Atlantis that was channeled by J.Z.Knight. As you might guess, J.Z.Knight is not her birth name and this fact was put forward in the article to support the idea that she was a fraud. Really? Someone channeling a 25,000 year old ghost might be a fraud? You amaze me.
More recently I read a negative review of Wild by Cheryl Strayed and the author of the review pointed out that this was not her birth name. Again, pen names are common enough that this shouldn’t matter one way or the other.
But then we get the meat of the matter. People who chose new names because they have fundamentally changed from who they once were. Well, doesn’t that really apply to all of us? Deadnaming has been adopted as a rallying point for the transgender community.Recently someone gave out Chelsea Manning’s birth name, this sparked a lot of tweets about how wrong this is and how you should never deadname anyone. I would like to respectfully disagree on one or two points.
Deadnaming is just one more thing for people to get pissed about. It’s a way of having the best of both worlds. Their old lives ended when they changed names, but they can still accept credit for whatever works and achievement they had before their rebirth. You just aren’t allowed to mention the fact that Jane Doe didn’t do such and such, John Doe did it. This makes no sense.
The Wachowski Brothers made The Matrix. The Wachowski Sisters made Sense8.
Bruce Jenner won five Olympic Gold Medals. Caitlyn Jenner is a reality TV star.
Why is this a problem? If we follow the revisionist history to its logical conclusion, Chelsea Manning shouldn’t be in jail since it was her dead male self that committed the crimes not her.
Augusten Burroughs has written a number of books that I liked, including Running With Scissors. But the last of his books that I read was A Wolf at the Table. Augusten Xon Burroughs is not his birth name, and yet when he went back and wrote about his childhood, he uses Augusten in the book. This is only jarring because I know he didn’t adopt the name when he was nine years old. And yet, this is what everyone complaining about deadnaming wants. They want to go back in time and speak like Pharaoh. The Name of Moses Shall Be Stricken.
Sorry folks, you’re not Pharaoh and your Obit is going to start with born as…
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