Eccentric Flower:199905/You cant have her back

I was not going to write another entry tonight - I wanted to finish the evening's catch-up with the relatively cheerful entry about newspaper comics. I especially didn't want to write anything big and controversial.

I had managed to bypass the whole mess over Ryan Ozawa and the mythical Kat. My journal-l reading lately has been perfunctory. I noted the controversy as an amicus curia, recognized the fact that I had a rather different perspective from the majority, and didn't say anything.

But Shmuel invoked my name. And so the genie is out of the bottle.

I have never read Ryan's journal. I have never corresponded with the man. I never read Kat/Ophelia's journal either. I looked at some pages from it tonight, and it's good, but it doesn't do much for me. Call me cranky, but if I'm going to read the journal of a human ten years younger than I am, I want it to be as intelligent as Samantha's. Frankly I believe the appeal of Ophelia's diary was mostly due to its then-rare personal level of content.

Content which, it now develops, was fictional.

Read Ryan's apologia first, if you haven't already. Read it all the way through.

Then read the latter half of this.

You may notice a few similarities.

When I first started playing online, I was in grade school, on BBSes. I generally used my own name simply because I didn't realize I could get away with using a female name. I was a naive child. But by the time I was in high school, I was using female identities routinely. (Traces of my "Lydia" identity, which I used until joining the Sociopolitical Ramifications muck in 1996 and inventing my plant-hybrid character, can still be found in dusty corners of the internet.)

This wasn't something I did for transgender reasons - my gender dysphoria wasn't something I was even fully aware of yet.

There are profound temptations in being female online, especially if you're a social outcast who is starved for companionship and acceptance. I have confirmed this through empirical work, as part of the things Nonelvis and I have researched for mouth organ: People talk to women online. They do not talk to men.

When one is unable to have a conversation in person among one's peers, but can go online and meet friends, instantly strike up five or six conversations at a time ... just by a change of pronoun ... it's rather self-reinforcing, be it right or wrong.

Later, I did more or less the same thing Ryan did: I invented a character to vicariously live the life that I couldn't have. Maybe it was a life I wouldn't let myself have, but the point is, Columbine was a better person, a more interesting person - even though we shared many of the same viewpoints.

By the by, it is extremely easy to play a convincing female online, especially if you have grown up in a house with two women who are not particularly abashed about their biology. For example, I know more about menstruation than some women of my acquaintance do - not that I need the deep cover; no one ever asks. Simply take all the worst "caveman" cliches ever directed at the male species and avoid all of them religiously. Be shy, quiet, cute, charming, and easily amused. You will pass for female instantaneously.

I never talked like this online as Columbine while I was still keeping my secret. Columbine wasn't allowed to be this strident back then. But Columbine burned her bridges in April of last year, and our personalities drifted closer together, to everyone's benefit I believe.

And, to my very great surprise, all of my Aether friends but one (who was rather a jerk anyway) forgave me and are still putting up with me today.

Why are people willing to forgive me and not Ryan? I suspect it's because all you ever got, before I pulled back the veil, were my opinions on various things. I didn't really bother to make up a life for Columbine - to the extent I did, it was my life, only slightly prettied up. And Columbine was so restrained under her corsets and petticoats that she wasn't really allowed to have a life of her own anyway.

But suppose I had, Ardent Reader. Would you still be here today? Or would you have abandoned me a year ago?

I can't attack Ryan. He did it for reasons I can sympathize with. He stopped when people started really becoming friends with Kat (which is exactly the same thing that prompted me to drop my veils). This shows he has a conscience. What more do you want?

I suspect that the problem really is that what you want is to have Kat back.

Well, too bad. We told you all along that the invented personalities were more interesting than ours. You can have honesty or you can have your dream friend. You can't have both.