Insulting is already a criminal offence, so it makes sense.

Intentionally insulting someone already is a crime under German law, so the only real question is why deadnaming is not already covered?

And these kinds of laws also exist in more extreme "free-speech" countries like the United States (where the guarantee of free speech doesn't cover, for example, libel).

libel and "insulting someone" in the sense of using slurs of defamatory remarks aren't obviously the same thing as referring to them by a previous name.

I'd be very surprised if the German law (if actually policed) expands to anything an individual might be insulted by, especially if the offense is one of self image.

Not to say that the US is a country of unrestricted free speech, but the standard of libel/slander is extremely strict in the US relative to basically every other country.

You must make intentionally untrue statements with the intent to harm that causes harm.

The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected. If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected. If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected. If no harm occurred, even if you tried to cause harm, you are protected.

The standard is extremely hard to reach, possibly even too hard, and it is clearly qualitatively different than most other countries.

I agree that the US is different from most countries in terms of how difficult it is to prove slander and libel. But I don't think your description is quite accurate. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.

> The truth is a perfect defense. Even if you thought you were lying, you are protected. If you believe what you are saying, you are protected.

IIUC the truth is a perfect defense in most states, but in some states maliciously stated truths (insults, more or less) can be defamatory. For example, see Johnson v Johnson in Rhode Island, where one Clifford Johnson was required to pay compensatory damages for (more or less accurately) calling his ex-wife a "[redacted] whore" in public. (He was also initially ordered to pay punitive damages, but that was reversed on appeal.)

> If you did not know for certain that you said a lie, you are protected.

I don't think this is the case in most states. If you say something with reckless disregard for the truth, it can be defamatory.

> If you did not mean to cause harm, you are protected.

I think this is typically only true of defaming public figures.

Fixed that: "That should not [need to] be a criminal offence."

Much like many other things. But, alas, we do not yet live in a world where people treat each other with even the simplest basic respect and we have to force the issue via laws.

I'll bite. Why does deadnaming have to be a criminal offence?

I think it depends on where (or even if) you draw the line on free speech when it comes to verbal harassment.

Here's a quick test. Let's say Bob goes for a walk, but Bob's neighbor, John, is a complete dick and whenever Bob leaves his house to go for a walk, John follows him and just hurls non-stop insults at Bob.

Should John's behavior be illegal? You could argue that as long as he's not trespassing anywhere, and he has the right to free speech, then John should be legally allowed to do this. In that case, it makes no sense to make deadnaming a criminal offense. There's no discussion to be had, as we've decided that asshole-ish speech is not illegal.

If you say no, it's verbal harassment, and should be illegal, then you're saying free speech does have limits, and we just gotta decide if deadnaming is bad enough to be illegal.

This kind of behaviour would most likely be prosecuted as harassment/stalking instead of hate speech/libel.

So unless you follow someone around and harass them - just saying someone's so-called "deadname" shouldn't be illegal.

John's behavior already is illegal in most Western jurisdictions. Your example does not demonstrate why deadnaming in particular needs to be a criminal offense.

Should it be a criminal offense to call someone a useless layabout who will never amount to anything and should have been aborted?

I worry that we've started to use the ponderous blunt government legal system more and more widely for things that used to be resolved via society and community censure. The law should be restricted to the most serious and large scale community disrupting acts, not for policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying. It's very unsuited for the latter.

> [the law is] very unsuited for [policing every bit of cheating, insults and lying]

100% agree. But since public shame and censure no longer work for limiting people's actions[1] that negatively affect others, what else do we have?

[1] And any time anyone tries, people scream "CANCEL CULTURE!!!!".

Worth noting that kiwifarms only negatively harms people who don't read it via the statoshistic terrorism mechanism.

Which would also apply to places like pre-Musk Twitter, reddit, tumblr and Facebook (and indeed every social media site), all of which have lead to targeted and sustained harassment of people, often for things they didn't actually do.

> things that used to be resolved via society and community censure

Hurricane declining to accept KiwiFarms' /36 into its BGP table is community censure.

And I think I agree that is the right level for this sort of thing to take place, even if I might disagree with both the specific decision and whether this sort of entity (monopoly level ISPs) should be able to make that decision.

What is the 'community' in this case? The entire globe, all Internet users?

On a local scale, 'community censure' may work well. But not so much on a global scale, where a few determined activists on the other side of the world can get a person fired, take away their Internet services, or even have their banking services removed, all over issues of 'speech', with no due process involved.

The community of network operators exchanging routes over BGP. Get yourself an ASN and some IP space and join us! At the end of the day, the Internet is a collection of independent networks, interconnected voluntarily when there is mutual benefit to doing so.

Community standards cannot exist in a diverse multicultural society because there no longer is a broad agreement on what those standards should be. Even things as basic as prohibitions on murder have various different "well, in this particular situation" exclusions that differ by culture. So anything that used to be community enforced now has to be elevated to legal enforcement, with some cultures disadvantaged and others favored by the choice of what the government will enforce on all regardless of individual cultural standards.

Or we can let different communities and cultures keep their different social norms and accept a bit of friction/"injustice" when people from one culture interact with another.

Forcing people to be courteous via the legal system sounds like an excellent way to make a criminal out of everyone.

Sure but what else can you do these days?

Not doing it seems like a perfectly good alternative.

You could try not being offended.

Equally, you could try not being offensive.

At this point, there's loads of books and CDs out there with 'deadnames' on the cover, and movies and games with them in the credits.

I guess the idea is to provide some shields to people making a transition, as they could suffer ostrisation or threats from people who have animosity against transgender.

Not everyone is a world famous artist that certainly can hire a whole team of body guard h24 all year around if they feel like it's appropriate.

I'm not aware of the the law in question. It seems strange to me to target specifically naming the person with this or that name, rather than cover the case in a more generic way like creating threats on someone's life or social integrity through public release of intimate information.

Deadnaming is typically done to be a cunt, which is a whole lot different than published works not having your new name on it.

Yours is not a remotely apt comparison of the situations.