My parents are also very… Possessive almost? Of our names. They are offended when I go by a nickname. It seems to be the thing that they cling to when they can’t control how their children grow up.
I tried to change what I called myself to my middle name around middle school and they were piiiiisssed.
My ex came out as enby and started going by their middle name (which was far more gender-neutral) but it got so confusing because for a long time they were only out in our queer circles, but the rest of our circles, including our professional circles which overlapped, they were still going by their first name and she/her.
There was this period AFTER we broke up where I didn’t know how to tell stories or mention them because it wasn’t clear to me if the queer people who knew them professional circles knew which name and pronouns to use.
Sometimes I struggle with telling old stories about several of my exes because they are trans or enby and that part is relevant to the story but even though they are not there, it’s like…okay the fact that person was presenting as a woman at the time is super-relevant to why/how we got kicked out somewhere.
(Also the struggle of identifying as a lesbian when I was younger, but nearly every single person I went out with in HS transitioned and therefore the whole…lesbian label got complicated for them and me.)
My Aunt refers to her daughter by her current name when refering to her pre-transition.
What I thought was kind of funny, then wondered if it was a little inappropriate )then again realized it wasn’t about me and her daughter was sitting next to her is when she said it) was “I always wanted to name a son Y, but since I had an X (daughter’s deadname) it was too similar. Maybe if we adopt again, I can name him Y since I don’t have an X anymore.”
So how people all around interact with names is kind of interesting.
We don’t use her deadname anymore, but it is kind of confusing to referring to her childhood, when she had that name.
I think the neat thing is that it wasn’t a moment. Every announcement I’ve run across (though I admit I haven’t gone, just found them on mainstream media) essentially said “Elliot has come out as non-binary transgender.” I took a picture for me to tie it all together. I see that as pretty cool progress.
This is the cool philosophical part, and the point when gender confirming naming departs from changing a maiden name, or Christian name changes to mark personal growth. Is our personal identity our name? Or is name a fundamental, but not singular marker of identity? Something else?
We’ll probably never specifically know the answer, but I find the exploration pretty neat, too.
And I think that’s a good point too – You could tie it together with a picture.
Like, if you aren’t personally acquainted with Elliot and will not interact with him, the clarification of “used to be by this name” probably isn’t vital information to you. If you must for the sake of clarity know who the heck it is people are talking about, you can look up his wiki page with his pic and filmography. If you can’t make that effort, it’s not really that important to you. If you do make the effort and you still don’t know who it is, being given the deadname probably isn’t gonna help you that much with context.
I would guess that “formerly known as…” might come up more in personal circles vs with celebrities… You can’t necessarily Google your old lab partner, friend’s college roommate, etc. Facebook isn’t always helpful. I think with husband and myself it comes up when only one of us keeps up with an old acquaintance so we want them to know who we mean when we talk about Elliot going forward, although they may not have much connection/interaction.
Question for the wise and well connected people here: what is the etiquette around sharing photos of someone pre-transition, after their transition? It feels like including pictures of someone with their ex, to me, which I’d normally avoid for a time… This came up before my wedding when I wanted to make a slideshow of photos of us with friends and family. Some great shots of a group of friends had a friend who has since come out, and we have not all met up in person since. I ended up running out of time and not doing the slideshow, and now I don’t have a good reason to ask how they feel about it, but the question is bonding around my head…
Yeah. In my former circle I was close to several people who were in relationships for all or part of one or both partner’s transition. They all unfolded in different ways. And the relationship and the non transitioning partner’s identity sometimes take a lot of scrutiny and sometimes not. I think that unless you are transitioning or in a relationship with someone who is transitioning your role in the confusion is just to pour love in.
I think that your instinct was right. Some people have a lot of trauma and sharing a picture of the trauma is impolite. It can also out them
To tap on to the philosophy side, because I literally wrote my dissertation on how we refer to people and events…
(Please ignore if this bores you, but this is the kind of linguistics that is actually relevant and fun.)
In linguistics, we make a very sharp designation between the “signifier” and the “signified” – between language and what it describes in the world. So that’s a strong distinction insofar as we are absolutely not the same thing as the language that’s used to talk about us. That might seem dumb and obvious but it’s the absolute foundation of talking about linguistic meaning. There is nothing about the word “cat” that somehow is really cat-like. It’s a random assortment of sounds that English speakers have collectively decided will refer to this concept of a small fuzzy four-legged beast with claws and opinions. There’s no mystic connection between the two. That’s true of names, too. There’s no mystic connection between us and our names. In that sense, names don’t matter a single whit; they’re just random collections of sounds.
Obvy names do actually matter, because we care about them a lot. Words are powerful, not because of the words themselves, but because of what they reflect about the state of the world, including human relationships. For names in particular, we often know a lot of background information about a person when we hear their name. We can know local/global origin, parents’ native language, social class, age, gender – hell, we know that they’re human, because most people don’t name e.g. their cars or pets Heather. As both people who bear names and people who use names, we want the information conveyed to be accurate. That matters to us socially. It really hurts us when it feels like someone lies about us or misleads us, or conveys information that’s inaccurate. It feels especially bad when people use the word that conveys inaccurate info after we’ve said “hey, um, here’s some more accurate info and a better word.”
So, “Elliot” is just some sounds we use to refer to a human being. That human being has never been the same thing as “Elliot” because all “Elliot” can ever be is linguistic shorthand for something that could never, ever be captured in language. (So yes, selfness absolutely transcends names.) “Elliot” is just a convenient shorthand that we use. It also matters a shit-ton that we use “Elliot” for that shorthand now and not a previous shorthand, because “Elliot” is what’s accurate. In particular, it’s what Elliot has told us is accurate.
Maybe the sounds “Ellen” used to be accurate, maybe not. Maybe Elliot was okay with having the sounds “Ellen” and all they convey used to describe him, maybe not. We don’t know him. All we do know is that it’s not accurate now. So, yeah, imo a polite person – especially a polite stranger – doesn’t mention the deadname because we have no idea about used to be accurate or what Elliot is okay with. We’d have to be Elliot’s friends to know that and we’re not, so.
I remember taking a whole class on that in grad school.
You had a theology grad program, right? I feel like this stuff is probably important for theology…
Philosophy. I was only a few credits short of my PhD coursework requirements when I burned out.
It doesn’t bore me at all. Shit is fascinating, innt?
I groked everything you wrote, and fervently agree. The difference between the signifier, and the signified, yes.
Names are a collection of sounds, yes.
The sound-group is used as a shortcut to signify the person, yes.
But then, we have no choice but to add the qualifier that names are really important signifiers. And that getting the signifier wrong, or worse using it incorrectly on purpose, is hugely painful to the signified because of the connectiion between the signifier and the signified. Suddenly you have free surface between the two, and everything is suddenly muddled. Like that moment someone took math, and used it to invent statistics.
The apparent contradiction is good for thinking brains to ponder. Just like its good to discuss and explore the central contradiction between gender being a construct, and gender being fundamental to the person. Neither contradiction need to be solved, or even worse resolved, which is good because both are impossible.
The shame is when the edge case ponderings are take out of the realm of people chatting on a forum, to weapons being used against a community.
If you want some more nerdery:
Names are absolutely super-important signifiers. They’re super sticky. For the nerd bit: One common way of dealing with names mathematically is to treat them as a type of rigid designator. A rigid designator always designates the same object in all possible worlds where that object exists. (A coherent full theory of naming is more complex than that but this is the base of one really common approach.)
You can see where this goes.
First, we get really emotional about our names, because they follow us everywhere.
Second, when someone willfully deadnames (the generic) you, one of the things that they convey in most contexts is that they deny the possible worlds in which your correct name can accurately designate you. If you follow implicatures down far enough, that can feel a lot like they’re denying your existence – because you only exist in the possible worlds where your name designates you; so if they deny your name, they deny you. That shit hurts.
(ETA: All that stuff conveyed might not be intentional – someone might not mean to convey all that. But it does get conveyed, because intention and interpretation are two totally different beasties.)
(Relatedly, this shit is why I got into linguistics. Language is hella arbitrary and it’s also fundamental to how we make claims about the world and our beliefs and our relationships. It’s a neurobiological system that is also a social construct. It is messy af.)
That is a really good way to explain this! I think it also explains the negative feels so many experience when being misgendered as well.
I’m glad it was a helpul way of phrasing it for you!
Ooooh thank you for that fascinating linguistic explanation 
