+On the evening of 10 October 2016, I put up my Facebook post for Coming Out Day:
+
+> Happy Coming Out Day! I'm a male with mild gender dysphoria which is almost certainly causally related to my autogynephilic sexual/romantic orientation, which I am genuinely proud of! This has no particular implications for how other people should interact with me!
+>
+> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
+>
+> Because we are already enduring it.
+
+It got 40 Likes—and one comment (from my half-brother, who was supportive, but didn't seem to understand what I was trying to do). Afterwards, I wondered if I had been too subtle—or perhaps that because Coming Out Day was supposed to be personal, no one wanted to look like a jerk by taking the bait and starting a political fight on my brave personal self-disclosure post.
+
+But Coming Out Day isn't, strictly, personal. _I_ had self-identified as autogynephilic for ten years, without being "out" about it (except during the _very unusual_ occasions when it was genuinely on-topic). The only reason I was making a Coming Out Day post in 2016 and not any of the previous ten years, was because the political environment had made it an issue.
+
+In some ways, it was nice to have the affordance to talk about an important part of my life that I otherwise mostly didn't get the opportunity to talk about. But on net, I _preferred_ the closet, if the affordance had to come in the form of a deluge of lies for me to combat.
+
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