Yep, didn’t know had an axe to grind and was a TERF. Late last night and earlier this morning, other articles were super vague about who was who and I should have caught the nuance even though this one seemed to spell things out for me.
Agreed, my post was directed at the article author. Didn’t even realize they didn’t mention the person’s real name at all, that shithead.
God damn it. I didn’t connect the two.
Alrighty, back to my PC. Rather than trying to, at best, resynthesize a well-respected source on the matter, I’ll just link to said source, who put things well and succinctly.
Anyway, here’s the Trans Journalists Association’s style guide.
Of particular interest to the original question, here’s their glossary entry for deadname:
A trans person’s given or former name that they no longer use, also often referred to as a “given name” or “legal name.” There’s never a reason to publish someone’s deadname in a story. Reporters should refrain from asking for this information unless it’s absolutely necessary for background checks or public records access. If writing about an individual, you should ask them what language they prefer if you refer to the existence of a deadname. While deadname is usually a noun, it’s also used as a verb to refer to the act of using the wrong name for a trans person.
This story is a little difficult to discuss without feeling like I’m going to risk playing into the intentions of bad-faith actors/outright TERFs.
For instance, it’s. . . not entirely unreasonable to assume that Aimee Knight (nee Challenor – she was recently married) may have faced abuse from her father, who is currently serving a lengthy sentence in the UK for some extremely disturbing sexual and physical abuse of a child in the same home he was raising Knight in. People further draw that inference when some sources connect old Deviantart/Facebook postings to Knight that seem to indicate an interest in a particular fetish community when she was younger, that has some overlaps with a particularly uncomfortable element of the abuse her father was convicted of.
However, it’s also a common anti-LGBTQ narrative that things like rape and sexual abuse as a child “make” people gay, and obviously, British celebrities like Rowling and Linehan perpetrate deeply hurtful lies about trans people as serial rapists lurking in bathrooms with ill intent.
It’s really easy to feed into those harmful narratives while trying to illustrate Knight’s potentially complicated/tragic history, and given that she’s been the genuine victim of a lot of outright, very loud transphobia, it’s not unreasonable to be on the lookout for more subtle forms of hatred directed her way as well.
Much like Fox leaping onto the chance to highlight the recent Colorado shooter’s “Muslim-soundin name” in order to flip a story about the horrors of gun violence into one of their preferred narrative lanes (that scary brown-skinned foreigners are coming to kill all the good godly white people), there are absolutely bad-faith actors on reddit – a site notorious for hosting massive hate-communities like /r/the_donald and the like – who are using the admins’ unquestionably bad decisionmaking around the bans/doxxing rule over-extension to advance their own anti-trans narratives.
None of which is to say that Knight is blameless. Hiring her father onto her political campaigns deep in the midst of his legal struggles ahead of his conviction while claiming to not know the extent of the crimes he stood accused of is. . . not great. The stuff her partner shared online, if it really was from him, was similarly, err not great. But dragging her own sexuality (e.g., interest in some entirely legal, if somewhat unusual, fetish communities) and gender identity into the mix, it’s very easy for bad actors to conflate actual problematic behavior with unrelated personal details in ways that advance transphobic narratives.
Reddit’s now let her go, and the drama is slowly simmering down, but you don’t have to dig far into some of the corners of the site and its vast comment sections to find pretty gross shit, before dedicated mod teams thankfully remove the bulk of it.
Anyway, sorry, this became a rambling exploration of why this topic is really hard to cover/talk about without being unwittingly coopted by bigots, although I suppose it’s not entirely off-topic, as even the initial post in this thread about it was linking to a pretty thoroughly transphobic source.
From skimming the articles, it seems like this person is a fucked up person, their gender aside. Or is that inaccurate?
She probably wasn’t the most risk-free hire for a PR position, and has repeatedly demonstrated, at best, some very questionable judgment, especially with regards to people she has a close relationship with. Unsure if that meets the criteria of “fucked up,” though that’s not, generally, how I would describe her based on my (less-than-a-day-old) awareness of her as a human being.
edit: Another wording may be that she’s getting a lot of guilty-by-association style accusations that also happen to directly advance transphobic narratives about rampant (fictional, of course) trans pedophilia. I’m unaware of any substantive accusations directly against Knight in that vein; her principle (and certainly not at all minor) offense was hiring her dad as her election agent several years ago.
She was photographed with her father’s victim and chose him for electoral agent after he’d been charged.
I thought part of one of those articles talked about her making pedophilic statements online herself.
People have connected some old social media posts about diaper fetish type stuff to Knight; I’m not sure if that connection is fully solid, and reputable media outlets, e.g., the Verge story I was reading earlier, don’t seem to be referencing that part of the story. While the more intense variations of baby/daddy roleplay, diaper play, etc., are pretty thoroughly and utterly not my bag of tea and make me pretty uncomfortable, I don’t think it rises to the point of her making actual pedophilic comments. If you’ve seen something more verifiable, I’m genuinely glad to reassess, though I’ll take anything that noted and extremely vocal transphobe Graham Lineham says on the topic with an enormous grain of salt.
Her partner’s alleged erotic stories would more definitively cross that threshold, though they went with the “I was hacked” routine regarding that material. I’m not sure how reliable that stuff is, either, but it’s at least being pretty consistently referenced by major media sources. Even without the issues with her dad and the campaign, this is probably enough for most companies to shy away from hiring her.
Bare minimum, it’s not unreasonable for someone to make some “where there’s smoke there’s fire” connections internally, and for that alone, she’s a risky hire for any company in the public eye. Which, if she’s genuinely innocent of any of that stuff personally, sucks. But, you know. Maybe don’t hire your creepy sex predator/convicted child molester dad to your political campaign?
@ArmandoPenblade this is a god-tier post; just a sterling example of thoughtful, careful, and generous explanation. I feel more thoughtful and informed, and also like I have a great model for how to explore complicated people in the future. Thank you.
So the Trans Journalist Association that Armando linked above says this:
writing about someone in the past
Use someone’s current name and pronouns when writing about that person in the past, unless they tell you differently.
I accept this as the general rule but I wonder about how to deal with people who have a past as a public figure and/or public performer. For example, is it reasonable to say something like “Elliot Page, who previously performed under the name of…” I can see an argument that using modifying language like “previously published under the name of…” or “previously elected to X office under the name of…” provides connection to important context.
On the other hand, given all the bad faith pejorative uses of deadnaming I get why the blanket rule was formulated.
Specifically for people with a contextually significant past as a public figure under a different name, I wonder about the best way to both respect the person’s identity and also provide connecting context.
Of course, this would all be easier without all the jerks continuously exploiting the edges to be assholes, like the author of that article @rei linked above. That article was quite deceptive in addition to being transphobic and insulting. For example, that article clearly gave rei an inaccurate/incomplete view of the situation.
I don’t believe so, though depending on which article you read they do a lot of hard work in the old guilt-by-association game to make her sound like one. Given societies intolerance towards trans individuals, I’m inclined to extend Ms Knight the benefit of the doubt here. It’s definitely proven that she made some bad choices in terms of associates, but she’s already had her career wrecked in the UK and had to move countries for a fresh start. As a believer in second chances, I’m sad that she lost another job over the same stuff. If there had been fresh issues or allegations indicating she hadn’t learned from mistakes that would be on thing, but as far as I can tell all the current kerfuffle is over the same old stuff that already ended her political career.
Thank you for clarifying… most of it. I am not sure I am going to go any further with this controversy, but it does kind of like they’re firing someone for the actions others did. And that’s assuming I even know who they are firing in the first place (might not).
I think part of it is unclear, in terms of the names used. I guess it’s her husband, Nathaniel Knight, that did some of that stuff? Admitted to writing pedophilic porn stories?
On some level, this seems kind of fucked up, and it goes beyond mere guilt by association… mainly because it seems like she is choosing, repeatedly, to associate with fucked up people.
It sounds like she is, herself, fucked up.
And really, this has nothing to do with her being trans. Trans folks are just people, and some people are fucked up. There’s no reason to think that Trans folks would be less fucked up than the general popualtion.
Not necessarily. This group has a very, very, I mean read astronomical suicide rate in comparison to other groups and unique challenges when it comes to relationships. That’s a vulnerability that predators likely find quite appealing. While anyone can be a victim of an abuser, these predators tend to target their victims purposefully.
I don’t think guilt-by-association and guilt-by-choice-of-association are different things.
Perhaps. But still, it’s kind of like that saying, “What do you call 9 people sitting at a table with a Nazi? A table full of Nazis.”
I feel like if someone is consistently choosing to associate with people who demonstrate criminal or borderline criminal tendencies involving abusing children… that person is harboring the same kinds of beliefs, because I know I sure as hell wouldn’t want to associate with those kinds of people.
Well, technically, guilt by association isn’t actually just talking about people you associate with. It’s a logical fallacy where you attribute bad qualities to one person, due to them sharing other, unrelated qualities with someone else who has also demonstrated bad qualities.
Actually choosing to associate with people IS in fact a conscious act, and you totally can be judged for it. We do it all the time. If I was hanging around with white supremacists, you would judge me for it, and that judgement would be absolutely not without merit.
Did you read something else because as far as I can tell, even with Armando’s try to make sense stuff… there is one person who abused a child in all this and he is currently, going to… on his way (?) to prison for that.
That seems like quite the leap to judgement to me. One can’t choose one’s parents, and I’m not about to judge someone for trying to keep a good relationship with a trash parent. Parent/child relationships are . . . complicated.