I'm not sure if you are trolling, but the article wasn't "dead naming a trans woman". It was an article in a mainstream uk magazine about a uk political party where her preferred name was mentioned

"Deadnaming" is explicitly using the birth/non-current name of a trans person. The article does that, and also uses "he" throughout. Both of those things are typically seen as quite offensive by trans people.

I don't think a site-wide ban of the person who posted the link is reasonable, but it is a shitty article.

I skimmed both articles and have found no proof of this. Both say "she", "Ms", and the correct name.

That's true of the articles directly linked in the reddit post, but not the Spectator article (that was not linked to) - https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/aimee-challenor-and-the-... - that one. (Which is the link that apparently led to the banning of the person who posted it)

Considering related threads are getting nuked all across Reddit I'm going to guess the article wasn't really the issue.

This article was not involved, it was not linked to from reddit. I'm not sure how it's relevant to the situation

Mainstream UK press has serious problem with TERFs, so my question was genuine: is my understanding correct, that the issue stems from someone linking to misgendering, dead naming article?

No. That is not correct.

Someone posted an article discussing some issues around women's issues specifically apropos The Green party. Actually a good article.

The article mentioned Aimee Challenor's name and the scandal around their deputy leadership bid.

This happened to be posted to reddit. It was removed by admin and the poster (a mod) banned. No one knew why.

Only when reddit made a statement to mods did it become clear that was the reason.

It's not just that, they have banned any mention of her name. You literally cannot even type her name in private messages without the message at least getting deleted, if you aren't banned.

I seriously doubt that. This is a claim I've seen in many places (unsubstantiated) but I find it hard to believe that her name is triggering bans. Dead name? Sure, I can believe that and, again, I have no problem with this.

They released a post saying they had a script set up to autoremove any mention of her current name, which often came with a ban.

That's some Chinese Communist Party level censoring.

Its called left for a reason

they have also been told that can't live-name her

also, she was the one who banned people for it (sketch)

also, I'm not sure that's why they were banned

If I write an article today about someone who transitions next year, am I (and all articles) supposed to spend time updating it? Wikipedia is a different story

You could but you, obviously, don't have to. The problem is not about the content though, it's about linking to it. So someone linking to this old article if there are recent, better sources could very well be doing it maliciously.

Think of it this way: if someone linked to an old article that used some slurs that used to be mainstream-acceptable at some point but aren't any more, would you feel uncomfortable? I hope you would. The reason people don't have this visceral reaction when it comes to trans people has a lot to do with broader lack of understanding of non-cis minorities.

There's an obvious problem with figuring out what the intentions of someone writing are. And we absolutely can't tell if e.g. someone dead naming is doing it on purpose or not. Not knowing and willing to learn is absolutely fine. But since you can't tell oblivious from malicious, you have two options: ignore assuming innocence or ban assuming malice.

Internet discourse is not courtroom, you don't have to assume innocence and it's absolutely fine to have a higher standard for communication on Reddit. Not that I think Reddit does, but it could. ;) So, again, what should you do with misgendering or dead naming? Since I sympathize with minorities and the oppressed, I would ban. But I'm absolutely sure many, many people would find a way to label what I'd considered hate speech "a freedom of speech issue" so I'm not at all surprised that this is causing a stir over on Reddit.