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In this diary, I record my life as a transvestite. Perhaps it will help somebody else, who finds their lifestyle doesn't quite match that endorsed by the 'tranny mafia'. Well, I've been there... and survived. The debriefing starts here.

�loves: All kinds of stuff that society thinks I shouldn't.

�hates: Microsoft. Obviously.

�reads:
secret-motel
my-serenade
boombasticat
annanotbob2
enfinblue
ten-oclock
stepfordtart
fifidellabon
artgnome
lawliiet
annanotbob

Lynn Jones
Becky
Samantha

Secrets and Lives
10:56 a.m. -- 2023-08-28

In a recent post, Anna raised an interesting point about online relationships and how they’re at risk of leaving you with a kind of unfinished business. You might be left wondering if a person is alive and well, or not. Even if you do manage to learn the fate of a friend from cyberspace, it’s still kind of weird.

I had a friend who died of cancer. We’d worked together on a web-based thing for a number of years (I won’t say what, since anonymity is important to me) when I learned he was terminally ill – and far too young for that sort of thing to be happening to him. After he died, I felt like I didn’t have a right to do anything more than send a simple message of condolence because we’d never met. Not even once... but we’d volunteered our time together, online, for years. That’s a thing that the 21st century doesn’t quite have etiquette for, yet.

Nowadays, I write books under a pseudonym. I have a ‘day job’, family and friends... and I have a compartment of my life in which there are other people who know a different ‘me’. If I’d had a bad case of COVID, got run over by a bus or simply suffered a bad head injury, the other ‘me’ (which, I suppose, includes these infrequent Diaryland posts) would just go dark.

Sometimes, I do just that. I have other things going on in my life that require all my attention; unlike most people who operate just a single online identity, I have lots. The persona under which I’ve worked to expose the evil of Scientology; the pen-name under which I write tranny fiction; the one under which I write mainstream stuff; the twitter account (remember Twitter? RIP) under which I did some whistle-blowing about corruption at a former employer; others too.

The only one I decided I really didn’t need was Facebook: deleted it and felt a whole lot better. Can’t recommend that strategy enough.

But my point is... staying safe online demands that we keep a certain amount of distance from strangers. People and companies don’t necessarily need to know about you... which is to say, it’s not always to your advantage. Wearing your heart on your sleeve is a big mistake: there’s bound to be somebody who would like to doxx you because they don’t like your politics, religion, gender, sexuality, diet, nationality, music, favourite Power Ranger, or something. In staying safe, it’s all too easy to isolate ourselves from the people we really ought to be a little bit closer to.

I don’t have an answer to this, other than perhaps maintaining a list of people to be notified if I die – but that in itself is a can of worms. Would you really want your family to become aware of the ‘other you’ just when they’re dealing with all the other stuff a death heaps on them?

I’ve decided to live forever. It’s really the only practical solution.

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