If you're surrounded by people who call trans people by their deadnames, you're most likely in a hate group. But a possible alternate explanation is that you're in academia. And it's not because that many academics are openly transphobic -- they just don't know that the site they fully trust, Google Scholar, is telling them to do it.

Google Scholar was developed in 2004 and has changed very little since then. It supplanted a lot of hard-to-use library search indices by providing a Google-style interface with a single search box. Now it's the most name-recognized site for searching for almost any paper by almost anyone. One aspect of the design was, authors are just a kind of search term. An author is a cluster of different ways to abbreviate a name, like Firstname Lastname, Firstname M. Lastname, and F Lastname, and you might see different forms in different places, but the underlying name will never change.

This is because Google Scholar was built by, and for, cis men with unchanging Western-style names. The "almost anyone" who you can search for excludes trans people, among a lot of other people it represents poorly. And because Scholar will not change, it should perish.

we were at Google during some of these events, but it was before we had much in the way of personal ability to fight for change. we did see trans Googlers (probably different ones than the assimilationists mentioned above) fight for improvement on this front, but unfortunately not in ways that wound up working; the company really only respects showings of hard power.

personally we do believe that there are trans Googlers who still have fight in them. we encourage you to look around at the institutions claiming to represent you and ask whether they do, and, if not, what you might do about it.

do not accept claims that it's necessary to be polite or ask nicely for change. that has never once been true; it only serves the status quo.

The only instance a human should ask another human nicely for something that is afforded to other humans without asking is never.