I guess it counts as dereferencing. Here is what standard says "A reference shall be initialized to refer to a valid object or function. Note: in particular, a

I guess it counts as dereferencing. Here is what standard says "A reference shall be initialized to refer to a valid object or function. Note: in particular, a null reference cannot exist in a well-defined program, because the only way to create such a reference would be to bind it to the “object” obtained by dereferencing a null pointer, which causes undefined behavior"