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Becky's T-Blog

Monday, October 06, 2008

ID

In the Wild West days of the internet, one of the huge attractions for trannies wasn't the perceived "anonymity" you gained by interacting online, it was actually almost the opposite. Trannies don't want to be anonymous, they want to be known, identified and recognised. They want to go into a tranny chat-room and be greeted like a regular at Cheers. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name... you just don't want it to be the same name that your boss or mum uses.

The beauty of the early internet was your feminine side could have an identity on the internet, in a way that she couldn't in the real world. You could also readily maintain multiple identities, keeping real and assumed personae separate and unique.

These days the Internet has cleaned up it's act, somewhat. Your identity on it has become more important, and systems like Google, Yahoo, and OpenID allow your identity to "flow" naturally from one service to the next. Anonymity has been sacrificed for seamless access to personal and personalised content. Which is great...

...if you're happy to be one person. Which most trannies aren't. One of the biggest problems I have these days is striking a balance between keeping my online identities for Simon and Becky separate, and still making the most of the integrated services that the internet provides. I'm fed up with having to log in to two different Facebook profiles, for example, but that's the only way I can do it without steadily outing myself to every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-work-colleague that finds me on the net.

I want to keep two sides of my life separate to others, but integrated to me. The annoying thing is that this isn't a desire unique to trannies. Surely everyone would like to have a bit of distance between their various professional and personal personas. The online services don't seem to get that, or if they do get it they don't do enough to support it.

Take Flickr, for example, which allows you to mark pictures as available to friends or family only. The Flickr people have recognised that we don't always want everyone to see pictures that we're happy to share with our closest relations. But it goes no-where near far enough.  How about being able to mark pictures as only visible to my drinking buddies, or only available to my professional clients? And even better, how about if my professional clients saw my Flickr ID as "Hyperglobal Mega Consultants" and my drinking buddies saw my ID as "Beermonster Dave"?

I'm not pretending it wouldn't take a lot of programming, and I'm not suggesting some kind of identity fraudster's charter. I'm just saying that maybe we all have more than one identity, and it's time that the social networking sites realised that a bit more.
Blogger Ellie Cartwright  Kill two birds with one stone? A tranny networking site, perhaps. It might be a step towards identity pluralism:

TVbo

Ellie is fumbling with breast forms.

View recklessly slutty photos of Ellie

Send Ellie an incomprehensible Sms-speak message filled with innuendo and astonishingly brave questions

Poke Ellie 
Blogger Pandora Caitiff  Ugh! Tell me about it...

I'm working on a little project with a tranny theme. Its going to go on my blog and shared with the Trannisphere.

But I'm soliciting advice from a design website I frequent in Bob mode. Which means I have to leave out the thematics stuff, and only discuss the practical nuts-and-bolts stuff.

Of course which rampant ego do I feed when I finally put my name on it?

My male name, and get flagged as "tranny???" (or worse "admirer"!). Or Pandora and lose it from my portfolio?

I think RTD was on to something with that "psychic paper" in Nu-Who. 
Blogger LucyTolliday  Know how it is.

Ever since I nearly sent a client an email from the wrong the gmail account. I've been trying to find a solution, transition is one rather drastic idea I suppose :). For the time being its to use different browsers.

Can't run 25 seperate online identities like some, so a programe that did it would be great, 
Blogger Rebecca  Is Hyperglobal Mega Consultants a division of Homers Compu-Hyper-Global-Mega-Net? 
Anonymous Suomy Nona  Yeah, we need this. Really quite badly... and the endless mergers and acquisitions between the big Internet 'brands' makes the problem worse as time goes on. Micro$oft acquired Hotmail, Yahoo got eGroups... and so on. What started out as separate identities on various sites are being scrunched together into an amalgam that I didn't choose. It's one reason why I chose the low-tech backwater, 'Diaryland' for my blog. Perhaps one day, somebody will make them an offer they can't refuse, though. 
Blogger Joanna  I know what you mean. Juggling the two identities is quite a pain at times.

I have the different browsers scenario as well. Jo uses IE and Outlook Express. Bob uses Firefox and Outlook.

Google Chrome is up for grabs.... 
Blogger Stephanie Watson  It doesn't work all that well going the other way, either, though. When I decided to transition I wanted to get rid of my male identity (obviously) but also my Delacey pseudonym - and have everything under one name.

It's harder than I thought. At Last.fm, for instance, my username was a version of my male name. You can't change your username, though. So I had to delete that account - and lose years of charts and stuff - and begin all over again. My blog is registered to that Delacey woman - and I can't change it. I could make a new Wordpress blog - but it's too much of a pain...

The trouble is, too, you can't remember everything. I'm still getting surprised when I log onto a site that I haven't visited for a long time and seeing what name I'm being greeted as :-p 
Blogger steph_angel  I love the way Google announces the fact that Steph Angel is logged onto my home PC, whenever I've commented on someone's blog!!! I could of course try to remember to log off, but do I???

I also love to communicate with my web host support department (which I use rather too much!!!)... My site is registered & paid for by blokey me, but my email is girlie me, and I can never remember which one I use... I think it changes every time :-p 
Anonymous NH  I want to go into a tranny chat room and have everyone go "NORM!" 
Blogger Lisa Lindstrom  I was thinking of Facebook the other day and wished they had a way of controlling who sees what...other friends...status updates...and the ability to post different status messages at the same time to different people. An example would be if I wanted my close friends to know that I was going through a hard time but didn't want people I just associate to know the same thing.

But then I thought of the management of knowing what you are saying to one group while what you are saying to another is beyond me...and even beyond my ability to manage/know the larger picture.

So, I choose to live a fragmented life...living life as Jasmin on one hand and living my male life on the other. The two different groups of people I know would not mix well at a social gathering...there might even be a fight or two! 
Blogger Kat  I know what you mean, but personally it's going the other way for me, in a real life way.

More and more of 'his' mates are now being introduced or made aware of 'her'. With very little discernible reaction. So the crossing of the streams is becoming less and less of a concern. And as the years pass, I'm getting to the point where I don't give a damn, Scarlett.

NB. talking about oneself in the third person is the way of the dark side and professional sportmen. 
Blogger thribble  I have to say I was over the moon when my ever up-to-the-moment geek husband told me that I could hide my status updates on Facebook from work colleagues. Hallelujah! Finally my status updates can be real!

But I get nervous - about my work vs personal life, but also about accidentally outing one of my tranny friends. What if I post a comment on a blog like this, someone finds the Thribble name, knows who I am IRL, and puts two and two together? What's a girl to do? Which is why you very rarely see me write anything - it doesn't mean I'm not reading and thinking, though! 
Anonymous Jessica  I had a conversation along those lines with a techie from Yahoo, he just didn't understand why you'd want two or more separate identities unless you were doing something you shouldn't be. I held back from screaming "what about the trannies!?!".

In the mean time I'm grateful for a little firefox plugin called CookieSwap which lets me flick between two or more whole sets of identities online. 
Blogger Lisa Lindstrom  Jessica, thanks for mentioning CookieSwap! I am going to give it a try. It's nice to have some tools that lessen the load for those of us who try to live two separate lives.

You should have told your techie friend that maybe people like Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent would want to have two different status messages. Could you imagine Clark's status message being "Just flown into work"? 
Anonymous Kath Adams  Kath's a multi-browser girl too. 'Bob' uses Firefox & Firefox while Kath uses IE or Safari.

Mrs Bob only ever uses Firefox on either machine, so she won't accidently stumble in to Kath's world (which she knows about but keeps at arms length!) 
Anonymous Demelza  What about Sandboxie - keeps a separate fork of your filesystems and registry? So my firefox inside Sandboxie has my Demelza cookies/usernames, the one on my desktop has Mr D. 
Blogger Gemma Catherine Seymour  I find it preferable to use two completely separate user accounts on my systems. This keeps everything easily compartmentalized. 

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