Deadnaming

Submission 17,132

Part of a series on Trans Rights. [View Related Entries]

About

Deadnaming is when a person calls a transgender person by the name they had before transitioning.

Origin

On September 16th, 2014, Urban Dictionary^[7] user Canola Yogurt posted the definition as, "n. The birth name of somebody who has changed their name. Most commonly attributed to trans people, but can be attributed to any person who has changed their name. (sometimes written as two words: dead name)." The definition gather 384 upvotes and 86 dislikes in five years.

Spread

On August 13th, 2018, actress Laverne Cox^[8] tweeted a note on how deadnaming a person is "an act of violence" (shown below). She goes on to explain, "The police misgendering and deadnaming trans murder victims as a matter of policy feels like a really good example of that cultural and structural violence." The tweet gained 1,900 likes and 700 retweets in a year.

Numerous media sources have published pieces on deadnaming like the NYTimes,^[6] HuffPost^[1] and Healthline.^[2]

Twitter Policy

On September 25th, 2018, Twitter^[5] updated their rules and policies to include: "We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals."

IMDb

On April 11th, 2019 IndieWire,^[3] reported on two anonymous trans actors who were deadnamed on their IMDb page and not able to change it. In a full statement given to Deadline^[4] an IMDb spokesperson said:

IMDb is committed to being the most authoritative and complete source of film, TV and celebrity information. Our users trust that when they use IMDb, they are receiving comprehensive and accurate biographical information.

IMDb strives to represent an individual’s gender identity while also accurately reflecting cast and crew listings as they appear in a production’s on-screen credits at the time of original release. When we become aware via our standard data contribution methods that an individual has changed their gender and/or name, we use the new gender and/or name on their page and credits. For productions they previously worked on, their credited name is also available in parentheses, in order to accurately reflect what was listed on-screen. This process is applied uniformly, consistently and without bias to preserve the factual historical record. For any individuals who wish to specify their preferred pronouns these can be recorded as part of their biography section.

Every page on IMDb has an ‘Edit’ button which any registered user can use to submit additions or corrections to IMDb content. Additionally, we have customer support staff to handle any question or request which, for any reason, can’t be communicated via our standard data contribution forms.