While namedtuples have a good reason to not support field names starting with an underscore (namely, to prevent name collision), it would be nice to still be able to define some sort of "private" attribute using (manual) double-underscore name mangling, i.e. allow "namedtuple('Foo', 'bar baz _Foo__qux')". It used to be possible to bypass the validation by passing a carefully crafted subclass of str to the factory function, but this is no longer an option after the fix for issue 21832 (which, by the way, seems a complete overkill - there are a lot of other casts-to-str in the stdlib which do not check that the result is exactly of type str (e.g., ConfigParser.read_dict), and if I want to execute untrusted code by passing a subclass of str I can always put that code in the __str__ method of the class anyways). Antony