A wrong and a wrong is a wrong and a wrong. Dominic is TA here. It is deliberate misgendendering and deadnaming, and therefore bigoted.

I’d say Dominic ITA but I guess he wants to be. Feelings are weird and they are all young. Let them all be assholes and hopefully grow from that. Let’s reevaluate this story in abiut ten years.

Both are assholes in different ways. James has proved that he doesn’t deserve respect from Dom, so Dom is acting accordingly. But at the same time, Dom needs to find a healthier way to express that grievance, if not move on altogether. I’m sure it’s not doing him any good lingering on James’ jilting.

Either way, James should not be a welcome person or idea in any of yalls lives at this point.

Edit: also, did you just refer to literal children as “men” or is James involved with some genuine creepy mfs?? If it’s the latter, something needs to be done about that ASAP, dude

The difficulty, I think, is that there are two different conceptions of respect here.

At the most fundamental level, there’s the respect that should automatically be granted to everyone - respect for the simple fact that they’re a human being, and thus deserving of a basic level of treatment and set of rights.

But there’s also a secondary level of respect - the respect that’s granted to a person who’s shown themselves to deserve it by being generally decent, kind, generous, honest, etc.

So in a sense, James really does not deserve respect - he hasn’t earned that secondary level of it.

But the problem is that using preferred gender and name is more in line with the first sort of respect than the second - not something that you grant only to a person who’s earned it, but something you should grant to any fellow human automatically.

So I’d have to say that Dominic is TA, but only sort of minimally.

Maybe a sort of compromise would be in order - Dominic can call James something like “James the asshole” and thereby meet the first level of respect while still overtly denying the second.

I’m sort of kidding with that.

Sort of.

i do not wish to be called my deadname (veronika is an online name and viktor is usually what i go by), so dominic should respect james regardless.

i will admit it’s hard to have empathy for the bully though if you were bullied, but i also struggle with empathy.

Sadly, he is soft YTA because he should use the right pronouns. James deserves respect, cheater or not.

Yes that’s an asshole move. By doing that he’s saying people only deserve respect and human dignity if he likes them. This is, in the transgender world, very much looked down upon to say it lightly