I'm so tired of this idea that trans/non-binary people are killing their past-selves by transitioning. I'm especially fed up with the term "deadname". You're implying that by figuring out a significant part of my identity, and by transitioning from my agab to my current gender identity, I murdered my past-self? I didn't kill anyone. I did not kill a version of myself that I no longer resonate with. Nor did these past versions of myself never exist. The little girl who lived in blissful ignorance, the confused teenager who was just starting learning about life and themself, they're not dead. I didn't kill them. They're just in the past, alive and well, happily enjoying a gaming session on Animal Jam or some shit.
When you're "deadnaming" me, you're not using the name of a person who once was, a person whom I supposedly killed by transitioning. You're just using a name that never belong to me, that I never resonated with even when I was a small kid who had never heard of non-binarity nor transidentity and who thought they were forever stuck with a name they didn't like. When you use my deadname, you're not referring to me, but to the false, preestablished idea you have of me, because you think I'm a cis woman. I was never cisgender nor a girl, even though that's what I believed for the longest fucking time because I'd always been told I was one.
I was never my deadname, so the name I was given cannot possibly belong to someone who's dead. The person who used to identify with this name (even though they never liked it and used it purely for lack of a better option) was real, in the past. No one died in the process of me finding my chosen name, or just me realizing I was genderqueer when I was 15. So saying that name belongs to a dead person is stupid. I was never that name, I was never that person, I just went with the lie because I didn't know any better.
It's like. A mythname, I guess. Cuz the idea of the person people associate with it is just that, an idea, a concept, a myth. It's fictional, and it's also a lie in some ways.
