• solarbabies@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    wow aren’t you just a ray of sunshine.

    what does that have to do with deadnaming people?

    I guess you’re the expert here since you Googled a condition & now you know everything there is to know about it, right?

    let me break it down. over 12 years ago when I was diagnosed, among the better-known symptoms like mixing up numbers, “misremembering names” (especially those that start with the same letter/sound) was a frequently published symptom of dyscalculia (and dyslexia, FWIW):

    fast forward to 2013, in the DSM-5 they changed the definition of dyslexia and dyscalculia, removed them as diagnoses and instead replaced them with a more general diagnosis: “Specific Learning Disorder”, which among other things now requires that a person is “unable to perform academically at a level appropriate to their intelligence and age.”

    in my opinion, and this is just my non-professional opinion:

    1. if I tell someone I have a “Specific Learning Disorder” they’ll generally have no idea what I’m talking about. it’s easier and feels more self-consistent to tell them the name of the condition I was diagnosed with, even if it’s outdated.

    2. the new DSM-5 diagnosis doesn’t account for people like me who were able to excel academically despite difficulty with numbers and names. did I have to read numbers 10+ times to make sure I knew I had the right one? yes. do I still struggle immensely to do basic arithmetic in my head? absolutely. am I also a software engineer who sometimes has to work with numbers? yes. did I get straight A’s in all my math classes? yes. people with dyslexia and dyscalculia excel all the time by discovering and using their own coping mechanisms, so this diagnosis seems overly reductive to me.

    again, I’m not a professional. is it possible that my symptoms which were previously attributed to dyscalculia are just a part of my ASD? sure. but I’m pretty sure if I said I have trouble remembering Elliot Page’s name because I’m autistic, people still wouldn’t know what I was talking about, and I’d have an even harder time explaining it. so there you go.

    • Gnome Kat
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      7 months ago

      Im also diagnosed ASD and now you are trying to use that to defend deadnaming, just stop. Disability doesn’t justify deadnaming people. If you can’t remember their name just google it like you would for anyone else who’s name you can’t remember. If you know they don’t use that name anymore and don’t like when people refer to them with it, even if you can’t remember what they prefer you shouldn’t use the old name. Just don’t use the old name, its dead… let it be dead. Dont use it. Its so simple, dont use that name if you know they don’t want people using that name.

      • Zoot@reddthat.com
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        7 months ago

        Generally when you can’t remember something, you don’t even know you’ve forgotten it. Do I think this is a lame excuse to ever deadname someone, sure! I am not defending this specific person, however as someone who suffers with similar issues, its infuriating to hear “Well if you cant remember, just Google it!”. Like, you need to understand they don’t realize they’ve even forgotten, and its will make you feel like shit to realize you’ve yet again forgotten something. (And may even feel gaslit if in some circumstances.)

        • Gnome Kat
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          7 months ago

          Stop trying to justify shitty behavior with disabilities, its wildly offensive and ableist. Disability doesn’t justify deadnaming. Just stop.

          This disability that hasn’t been in the DSM for over 10 years doesn’t mention anything about forgetting if someone transitioned. If you know the name is dead, don’t use it. For fucks sake its so simple.

          You wanna know what being gaslit feels like?? When the people around you keep making up shitty excuseses for why they can’t use your preferred name and make it out like you are the bad guy for asking them to use the correct one.