Anyway. One _more_ thing that had been disappointing about my February ordeal is that I had originally been scheduled to fly to Portland on 17–19 February for a brief vacation in order to [crossplay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossplay) at the [WizardWorld](http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) comic convention there and visit friend of the blog "Jerrica", who—
-Ah. A brief digression is needed here. I invented the pseudonym "Mark Taylor Saotome-Westlake" for this blog because when I privately told people that I wanted to write about my autogynephilia and to advocate for AGP's causal role in the development of MtF transgenderedness being public knowledge, everyone said it would be smarter to use a pseudonym, and possibly to obfuscate my physical location as well, and I listened to them. Thus all the references to "Portland" (scare-quoted in the first appearance in each post) or [its metro area](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-counter/) in the blog so far, suggesting that I should be thought of as living there (and thus, that it wouldn't make sense for me to write of flying there on vacation, as in the previous paragraph).
+Ah. A brief digression is needed here. I invented the pseudonym "Mark Taylor Saotome-Westlake" for this blog because when I privately told people that I wanted to write about my autogynephilia and to advocate for AGP's causal role in the development of MtF transgenderedness being public knowledge, everyone said it would be smarter to use a pseudonym, and possibly to obfuscate my physical location as well, and I listened to them. Thus all the references to "Portland" (scare-quoted in the first appearance in each post) or [its metro area](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) in the blog so far, suggesting that I should be thought of as living there (and thus, that it wouldn't make sense for me to write of flying there on vacation, as in the previous paragraph).
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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff