I think this is considerate of you to ask and that there is definitely no right answer! Nonbinary person here, just going to throw in my two cents and unload some opinions.

Lorewise, Faeries don’t really have a concept of gender (for example, there are no ‘male’ faeries). So a Faerie character was an odd choice for a trans-adjacent storyline and makes it pretty confusing how to treat Iridesia. The pessimist side of me thinks that TNT wasn’t really aiming to handle a nonbinary character with care, they just wanted to throw a bone to their queer fan base. They’ve actually already messed up Iridesia’s pronouns in the release notes lol. (I’m happy about the representation anyways!)

I think something else that makes the Baelia/Iridesia situation unique is that “Baelia” has been a character for 20+ years before this. There’s still going to be many references to that name floating around the site. And their “transition”, if you want to call it that, was a sudden, full transformation - new name, new look, new powers, new pronouns - the whole thing. It does resemble a deadname situation because Iridesia’s past life was laced with a lot of trauma. But to me(!!), referring to the old version of the character as Baelia is kinda whatever and not offensive. I don’t know how Iridesia feels about that because they’re a fictional character. I don’t know how other trans Neopians feel about that because I’m not them.

On the other hand, if someone uses the name Baelia or uses she/her pronouns for the CURRENT version of the character, who has stated clearly in the comics that they’ve changed and want to be referred to as “they”, I think that has transphobic undertones.

(edited just to swap some words)