I was told the term comes from your dead name being what they put on your tombstone. The name you’d be unwillingly known as after you died. The erasure of trans lives by transphobic family members. I don’t think its wrong to use it outside of that context but it would be bad to lose that history.
I was told the term comes from your dead name being what they put on your tombstone. The name you’d be unwillingly known as after you died. The erasure of trans lives by transphobic family members. I don’t think its wrong to use it outside of that context but it would be bad to lose that history.
I always thought it was a ‘dead’ name in the sense that a person you no longer associate with is ‘dead to me now’.
Like, ‘dead’ in the sense of defunct, obsolete, deprecated, no longer relevant, no longer functional.
That’s interesting! I always assumed it was the literal “that name is no longer with us”, but that makes a lot of sense.