But after the events recounted in this post, that cautious, prudent advice to keep my identity and location secret is starting to seem unduly _cowardly_. The meta-level phenomenon that I'm so upset about (distinct from the object-level issue of how transness works) is _precisely_ that people are _far_ more reasonable in private than in public, that there are things that are knowable and known that almost no one is willing to _say out loud in public_ because they're _afraid_. (Whether of being harrassed by social-media mobs, or losing their job, or getting eaten by HIPAA-demons, no one ever seems to specify, but that's not surprising: if we knew how to reduce our fear to a probability distribution over outcomes conditional on actions, then our spirits would be one with the Bayes-structure, and the fear would not control us.) But protecting the social freedom to say true things out loud is _really important_ for the quality of our collective epistemology, which seems like the kind of social issue worth caring about, if anything is.
But after the events recounted in this post, that cautious, prudent advice to keep my identity and location secret is starting to seem unduly _cowardly_. The meta-level phenomenon that I'm so upset about (distinct from the object-level issue of how transness works) is _precisely_ that people are _far_ more reasonable in private than in public, that there are things that are knowable and known that almost no one is willing to _say out loud in public_ because they're _afraid_. (Whether of being harrassed by social-media mobs, or losing their job, or getting eaten by HIPAA-demons, no one ever seems to specify, but that's not surprising: if we knew how to reduce our fear to a probability distribution over outcomes conditional on actions, then our spirits would be one with the Bayes-structure, and the fear would not control us.) But protecting the social freedom to say true things out loud is _really important_ for the quality of our collective epistemology, which seems like the kind of social issue worth caring about, if anything is.