+It would be difficult and tedious to recount the exact sequence of what I thought and did during this period; the general theme was _extreme confusion and uncertainty_ about, um, everything, including the nature of reality, but particularly about people's true motivations and what ubiquitous threats might lurk behind everyone's [socially-desirable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias) lies about how the world works, which I had spent my entire life being duped by.
+
+Maybe people get kidnapped and thrown in prisons (mostly prisons-masquerading-as-hospitals if they're of my social class) _all the time_. Maybe they often _die_ in there. Maybe sometimes they escape, perhaps with the help of friends who are willing to pretend to be family members, the authorities being more likely to release someone into the care of family rather than mere friends. (And then no one talks about it, fearing stigma and loss of credibility.) Maybe sometimes the prison authorities mistake someone's identity and manage to successfully use social pressure to brainwash them into accepting that identity—the authorities reasoning that if the paperwork says the patient's name is, say, Michael Jones, that _must_ be his name, and he mustn't be released until he truly accepts this, even if the patient currently insists that his name is Mark Saotome-Westlake (the testimony of crazy people being assigned zero evidential weight, and the possibility of a paperwork mixup being assigned prior probability zero). Maybe people who talk about reincarnation and past lives are actually talking about things that really happened to them before a traumatic event after which they ended up in a new social environment that forcibly brainwashed them into adopting a new identity. (Stockholm syndrome has every reason to be _adaptive_; as a just-so story, imagine a surviving woman on the losing side of tribal warfare during the endless æons of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness doing better for her genes by starting a new life under the bondage of her captors rather than going down with a fight like her brothers.) Maybe, _&c_. (I was also entertaining some much weirder hypotheses that I'll get to some of briefly.)
+
+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 at [a comic convention there](http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) 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 autogynephilia's causal role in the development of non-exclusively-androphilic MtF transgenderedness being publicly recognized, 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 to indicate that it's an obfuscation) or [its metro area](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-counter/) in the blog so far.
+
+But after the events being discussed in this post, that cautious, prudent advice to keep my identity secret is starting to seem unduly _cowardly_. The meta-level phenomenon that I'm so upset about is _precisely_ that people are far more reasonable in private than in public. I still like my pretty pseudonym as a branding/market-segmentation device (gender blogging is _something I have to do_, but maybe not the _first_ thing I want associated with my name), but it shouldn't be a _secret_ that my real name is Zack M. Davis (if you like _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, check out my real-name mostly-not-gender-related blog, [_An Algorithmic Lucidity_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/)!) and that I currently live in Berkeley, California.
+
+(Of course, to protect _their_ privacy, I'm still going to obfuscate and scare-quote-on-first-appearance the names of _other_ people who haven't consented to be part of my story.)