Oh dear I slept on this thread. Forgive me if I repeat a point someone else made earlier, I'm catching up from where I left off.
Bullying does this too sometimes, and it's not clear why verbal rejection of "core identity" is materially worse than other forms of bullying in terms of harm. For example, targets of bullying can be attacked physically or have false allegations made about them. A bully is generally disliked by the target, so it's still not clear what special about having a bully reject someone's identity vs outright attacking them in various ways.
Erm ... I'm not sure what you think of when you write of "regular-grade bullying", but when I think back to, say, middle and high school, "regular bullying" would certainly include physical violence, extortion, destruction or damage to victim's property and so. Never mind verbal insults or ostracization of the victim, of course.
I don't think that anyone is saying that "just" verbal harassment of any kind (including deadnaming) is worse than physical violence. However, deadnaming is worse than verbally harassing someone for having freckles or something like that as there is a long history of the harassment, torture and killing of LGBT people. Often this was done in the name of the state as well. There are circumstances where a person who is white and who is gender conforming could be verbally harassed in a way that would be a similar level of awful to deadnaming (for instance they could be disabled or overweight).
Having said all this I don't want to downplay the horrendous awful verbal harassment that happens to people who aren't part of a minority group in schools. Generally people who are part of a visible minority group get it a lot worse though (and being gender nonconforming and/or trans is very often visible).
Also I think people are being extremely unfair with my and Cardgame's arguments - it was pretty clear from the context of our posts that we were talking about verbal harassment. Cardgame specifically said "bullying name or insult", clarifying even beyond what my post said.
If you are to legally regulate it differently than bullying, it should require proving. If you are to simply disagree on the extent of harm, there's no need for proof.
To clarify I mean that deadnaming is worse than most other forms of verbal harassment.
I believe the proof in form of mental health statistics and personal testimony is more than enough to prove this for me and many other people. Some people will never be convinced by the amount of evidence provided. And hopefully trans people and their allies won't need to convince them.
Bullying vs deadnaming/specific things that upset a group of people. Just to give an example or two, when I was in high school one of the kids was tied up with jump rope to the point where he couldn't move (by walking) or untie himself, then tossed head first into a garbage can + left there for some time. In the adult world, this is obviously assault and battery, but this sort of story wasn't too uncommon in the school. Same for extensive social ostracization over a fake story (one of the girls allegedly had a book of everyone she'd slept with, and the strain this caused on her was high). It didn't matter that the number of people was large enough to strain plausibility, or that prior to that book she didn't have that kind of reputation despite that sleeping with like 1/3 to half of the boys in a class of > 300 would be a hard secret to keep. Well, some of us doubted the story at least, for obvious reasons.
The targets of this stuff suffered a lot. Enough that I cast doubt that deadnaming someone in one on one conversation is necessarily worse.
This is an unreasonable comparison that I already addressed earlier. I never claimed that intentional deadnaming was worse than physical violence and social ostracisation.
Your stories are horrible and I feel sorry for people exposed to that sort of trauma. Society should take this sort of thing more seriously in high school (not going to go into that too much because that's going to derail things). But if we're going to talk about social ostracisation and violence, transpeople get exposed to this sort of thing at a higher rate than the general population and it often doesn't stop at highschool.
I don't know why you guys keep engaging with someone who thinks it's all a game. You will outright never convince him even if you go down to his level.
I'm primarily interested in presenting a challenge to these arguments like these because I worry that other people who are not as engaged in this topic will come into the thread and think that these arguments are good if they're not being challenged.
I have scanned the wikimedia thread
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadnaming
for "bull"
and not found it.
Wikipedia clearly thinks (as much as a collective such as that can have thoughts about anything) that Deadnaming is significantly worse than bullying. They describe it as a potential act of aggression and they're right.
To clarify, I would argue it's similar to making up an unflattering nickname for someone and refusing to call them anything else. In both cases, someone is denied the same aspect of the identity (their valid name). The more people that do it (or the closer they are to the person being bullied) the worse it gets.
It really isn't, unless said unflattering nickname includes or is derivative of a slur. Seon and Yeekim have elaborated on what I was going to say here already.
