The Daily Wire can’t stop, won’t stop, probably should stop deadnaming Elliot Page

Actor Elliot Page doesn’t have to say anything, or do anything other than simply exist in order to send the hamsters in the brains of transphobes skittering. Consider the case of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, which keeps pooping out new stories on the subject of Mr. Page not tied to any news hook but rather to some obsession they’ve developed with deadnaming him.

Certainly they have been inspired by the recent controversy surrounding Canadian fusspot reactionary Jordan Peterson, whom the Daily Wire just signed up as a contributor of little video rants to their new venture DailyWire+.

Peterson recently got himself kicked off of Twitter for a nasty tweet that deadnamed the actor — and JPete has been milking his “free speech” martyrdom as best he can, starting off his new series of DailyWire+ videos with a petulant rant about Page and pronouns. Then in a podcast interview he let slip that if Page hadn’t shown off his cut abs in photos that were all over the internet, JPete wouldn’t have even tweeted his original tweet. (In his mind, it’s all about “recruitment.” Seeing Page looking good might lead some poor confused girls to decide that they were trans.) To people who aren’t raging transphobes, this whole thing makes Peterson look like the weirdo idiot he is.

But apparently not to the editors of the Daily Wire, who look at Peterson’s latest spin in the spotlight and see clicks, a lot of clicks. If deadnaming Elliot Page generates traffic, well, why not generate as much traffic as possible, seems to be the logic here.

So the site has been putting up posts about Page that seem to be little more than excuses to deadname him.

Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles wrote a long post reflecting on the idea of deadnames and how gosh darn confusing they can be. (In what follows, I’ve replaced the deadname with the word “deadname.”) He noted that the website for the Oscars still lists Page’s original name in the list of nominees for “best actress” in 2008.

Essentially, Knowles seems to imply that because Page once got a nomination for best actress the very notion of transgenderism is a fraud.

Knowles also offered what I suppose he thinks is a clever “argument” against the very idea of a deadname — the fact that Page is actually still alive.

Today [Deadname] goes by “Elliot” and has even legally changed her name. But “[Deadname]” isn’t Miss Page’s “deadname.” Even if one were to accept the dubious premise that men have a right to call themselves “Sally” and ladies a right to call themselves “Hank,” [Deadname] isn’t dead. She is very much alive and has called herself “[Deadname]” for 33 of her 35 years.

Knowles managed to misgender Page not once, not twice, but eight times in four sentences. I’m sure he must be very proud of himself.

He concludes his rambling diatribe with this bit of nonsense:

Either [Deadname] Page is [Deadname], or none of us can say who she is or ever was — just as our opponents who control the public square want it.

What the fuck does that even mean?

Anyway, the editors at the Daily Wire were apparently so thrilled by Knowles’s weird rant that they ran another post about the Knowles post, with the title: “Name ‘[Deadname] Page’ Erased From Oscars, IMDb Pages Except In One Spot.” In the post, writer Amanda Harding mainly just rehashed Knowle’s argument, writing that

The short bio on the Hollywood star doesn’t contain the name “Deadname” at all, even for roles that Page performed under the former name. Page’s acting past has been erased and rewritten, which Knowles compares to the classic dystopian novel “1984.”

Oh yeah, he did that. Because if you’re going for a literary reference why not go with the most hackneyed one possible?

The Daily Wire’s David Marcus wrote his own take on le affaire Elliot Page which was largely a defense of Peterson’s refusal to take down his original tweet about him, which Marcus attributes to the psychologist’s commitment to “radical truth,” which is apparently even better than regular truth because it allows you to be a shithead when it comes to transgender people and plus-sized Sports Illustrated models. Or something along those lines. I really didn’t read it very carefully. But can you blame me? Here’s the conclusion to his post:

In our confusing modern techno fog in which the physical and metaphysical blend with apparent ease his torch of truth sits alight up his philosophical hilltop, a beacon for those who wish to live free. May it ever be so.

The whole thing is like that. At least he only deadnames Page once.

I should also note that there is yet another post on Page that went up today on the site only to mysteriously disappear sometime before I tried to look at it. It was titled “”The ‘Transformation’ Of [Deadname] Page” and the Media’s Compulsory Praise,” so you can imagine where that one would be going.

I can’t imagine why they would take the story down. Maybe because it didn’t deadname Page enough.

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