Reopening this issue, as there is another branch (for non-GC heaptypes) earlier in subtype_dealloc that I believe suffers from the same problem. Actually triggering the error in a test has been difficult because as far as I can tell it relies on garbage collection at the right time, but reading the code it seems clear it's problematic. I'll prepare a PR to fix it there.

I'm also reopening this issue because I believe it should've been backported to 3.9, and possibly 3.8 (if it's considered a security problem to get python to read and write freed memory). I found this issue in 3.9 while debugging a pybind11 crash. I'll backport after the other PR is in (or rejected).