The First Street Journal is committed to doing something really, really radical, and that is telling the truth. In the pursuit of that, I have published our Stylebook,[1]I give complete permission to anyone else who likes our Stylebook to adopt it as his own, with the appropriate reference, of course! something rarely done these days. In it, I noted:
Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the names, honorifics, and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth; the site owner does not agree with the cockamamie notion that anyone can simply ‘identify’ with a sex which is not his own, nor that any medical ‘treatment’ or surgery can change a person’s natural sex; all that it can do is physically mutilate a person.
Our Stylebook was first published on November 12, 2020, so this is not a new thing for this website. But USA Today seems to think we are hurting other people by telling the truth.
‘A matter of physical safety’: What it means to deadname someone and the impact it makes
by Clare Mulroy | Monday, March 11, 2024 | 6:02 AM EDT | Updated: 9:57 AM EDT
Merriam-Webster named “authentic” its 2023 Word of the Year, but other top contenders included “indict,” “rizz” and “deadname.” These words reflect increased search and cultural impact.
“Deadnaming” is one word that’s coming up on the campaign trail – the local one, that is. In Ohio, three out of four transgender candidates have been challenged or disqualified based on an elections law that penalizes candidates who don’t put their former names on petitions, the Associated Press reported.
But what is a deadname and what does it mean to call someone by it?
Deadnaming is when someone refers to a transgender or nonbinary person by a name they used before transitioning. This is often the name they were assigned at birth, also called a deadname.
In other words, it is telling the truth! Bradley Manning might really, really, really believe that he’s a woman named “Chelsea,” and he actually got his name changed legally, but he’s not a woman, and never will be. Referring to him as “Chelsea” is lying, not just to him, but to yourself.
Deadnaming can be intentional or unintentional. Both instances cause harm.
“It isn’t just a matter of comfort (for trans people), it’s a matter of physical safety,” Olivia Hunt, the policy director at the National Center for Transgender Equality told USA TODAY. “How you address someone tells them a lot about how you view them as a person and also communicates to other people how they should treat that person.”
So, it seems that Miss Mulroy believes that I should deliberately lie, not only to be polite, but to not do so is a “matter of physical safety” for the ‘transgendered.’ Sorry, but deliberately lying is not polite. This isn’t a matter of “Do these jeans make me look fat?” kind of questions, but ones of objective reality.
In the year 2525, if man is still alive, when an anthropologist digs up the grave of Chad Malloy, a ‘transgender’ writer who calls himself “Parker,” as the anthropologist is trying to figure out what society was like in the early 21st century, before the nuclear devastation of World War III, he will examine the remains scientifically. Five hundred years from now, the soft tissues will have long decayed away, and the anthropologist will have just the skeleton. He will examine the structure of the pelvis, and write down in his notes — perhaps with a quill pen and ink on parchment; who knows how much we will have recovered from the war? — “The subject was male,” which will be an objective conclusion based on the scientific fact that males and females have different pelvic structures.
And if there is still some recoverable DNA from the remains, and the technology still exists to examine that, the anthropologist will discover that the subject has XY, rather than XX chromosomes, and will again write in his notes, “The subject was male.” This will be an objective fact.
There are no federal laws surrounding deadnaming, though local and state legislature have moved in both directions in recent years – some providing legal security for trans and nonbinary individuals’ name and pronoun usage and others forcing them to use deadnames in school settings.
In 2021, California became the first state to ban colleges from deadnaming students on university records. Social media apps have updated their use guidelines to ban deadnaming. In 2023, Discord added deadnaming and misgendering to its hate speech guidelines. TikTok banned both in 2022. Twitter, on the other hand, quietly rolled back its former policy against deadnaming and misgendering in April 2023.
We have previously reported on how The New York Times gave major OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to tell us that Free Speech Is Killing Us, and to Mr Malloy to tell us How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech. It seems as though the guardians of the so-called Fourth Estate just don’t like interlopers! Greg Bensinger, a Times Editorial Board member, wrote that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place,” because Mr Musk was significantly loosening the editorial censorship on Twitter, was allowing more actual freedom of speech. Heaven forfend!
And now Miss Mulroy, who did go further to tell readers the legal difficulties the ‘transgendered’ face in trying to change their documents, is telling us that simply telling the truth, something I always do, is seriously harming the ‘transgendered.’ Sorry, but nope, I do not go along with that, and I will not cease telling the truth.
George Orwell wrote, in his dystopian novel 1984, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” What Miss Mulroy, and so many others in the credentialed media, are telling us is that we must reject objective truth, and go along with the subjective claims of the mentally ill. The inmates are running the asylum, and the staff are going right along with it. When the government and the credentialed media play Nurse Ratched, be Randle Patrick McMurphy!
References
| ↑1 | I give complete permission to anyone else who likes our Stylebook to adopt it as his own, with the appropriate reference, of course! |
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