Privacy, Secrecy, and Identity
This is a story about how I stopped caring if my potential employers see what I post online. There will be some sexual content.
I have one major social media account that I use for almost all my social media needs: my personal facebook account. It has my “real” name on it (“real” in the legal sense as well as in the sense that it’s the name most people call me in “real life.”) It’s the name I’m known by at work, at home, among friends, and as a writer. It’s the same name I use in youtube comments and in addiction recovery groups. It’s the name I put on my food delivery order and the open-mic sign-up sheet, and it’s the name I tell to my dates before we meet in person.
I don’t know a lot of people who live this way. Nor is it a lifestyle that has been given a name or an online message board or discord server, as all lifestyles must have in order to be considered a legitimate “Lifestyle”. It’s actually a personal decision I made in my late teens, circa 2005, and simply continued to this day. Yes — even before I transitioned.
With a few very isolated exceptions, I have one identity almost everywhere. Transitioning occurred in all those spaces at once, to the degree that was feasible within the institutions I occupied. This isn’t exactly super common. It’s more usual for a trans person with an online presence to transition one or more of their online personae first, where their exposure to backlash can be limited while they figure out how to express their new gender comfortably. For trans students in accepting campus environments, it’s not unheard of to live out as one gender at school and put their old gender back on for visits home. A fair amount of switching back and forth is common early on. I didn’t really do that. I just went about it as if I only had one life to live and wanted to live it my way.
I made a bunch of mistakes. I had a lot of awkward conversations where I had to catch people up on the rapidly-evolving situation during hasty chance encounters on the bus or in cafes where I never would have expected to run into you of all people. There are some decisions I wish I’d given myself more time to think through, and other decisions I really wish I’d made sooner. But it’s really hard to do this kind of thing in the best of circumstances, and all of the mistakes and stumbles and risks are dwarfed by the euphoric truth I’m living. That’s hard to ignore.
I’m soon to finish my bachelor’s degree. I’ll be 32 when I do. I’ll have spent almost four years trying to do something I gave up on ever doing when I was only 21.
In Spring of 2009, the last semester before I dropped out of community college, I told one professor about my decision. He fought with me about it. He didn’t want me to drop out. He knew I was one of the smartest kids in that class, and he wanted me to keep at it, no matter the major, as long as I stayed in school. When he saw he hadn’t convinced me, he said “You’ll be back” with a confidence that I only understood when I saw his prediction come true. But I didn’t believe him at the time. He was only one man, and he couldn’t do anything about my utter incompetence at self-management. I had no motivation. I had no fear. I only had apathy and occasional glimpses of curiosity. I loved learning; I hated being a student. I didn’t yet understand the connection between the two.
When I tried to enter the workforce after that, I found out that it was 2009 and there were no jobs. There weren’t even any jobs for able-bodied straight white men with fresh Computer Science degrees, let alone greasy depressed community college dropouts with undiagnosed Asperger’s. The best job I ever had was as a part-time cashier at a gas station working for a racist.
One of the reasons it’s so uncommon to live one’s whole life under one name is that we’ve all gotten used to being able to say “My boss at that job was a racist” while comfortably assured that we can still list him as a reference on job applications. And that never really sat well with me. Don’t get me wrong: I won’t judge anyone for wanting to keep certain parts of their lives separated. But I’m just not that great at keeping my lives straight, if you’ll pardon the pun. Whatever I try to keep sequestered will either wither away… or bleed through. I’ll either accidentally call my boss a racist… or I’ll quietly stop noticing the racism.
So what happened in 2005? Well, it’s not like I made a decision to live without lies and set up a bunch of rules to live by to ensure that I would follow through. I did make a decision, if that’s what you want to call a late-night spiritual experience possibly influenced by some powerful adhesive fumes and an unventilated room. But all I really did to move in this particular direction was pick one screenname for most of my online activities, and stick with it for the next several years. Over time I just got used to having as few discrete online identities as possible, and then Facebook made it more normal to use one’s “real” name online so I no longer had to even use that old screenname anymore.
The gas station cashier labor market isn’t exactly complex. You can typically stay in the game if you silently endure verbal abuse and never, ever request schedule changes. But soon I’ll be entering a workforce characterized by business cards and firm handshakes and well-rehearsed elevator pitches, at least as far as I’ve been led to believe. I don’t know what the standards are, and honestly, I’m pretty sure nobody else does either.
But that doesn’t seem to keep anyone from telling me how they think I can increase my odds in the professional market. Oh and it’s all about increasing odds: you have to be pretty freakin’ lucky to get your application even looked at most of the time, unless you follow an intricate pattern of unspoken, unwritten, ever-shifting signals to dodge the various electronic filters employer will use against you. The job application process, you see, is thoroughly booby-trapped, and you need a reliable guide to teach you the safest path. It usually involves strategically concealing parts of your identity, so as to cultivate a deceptive image with plausible deniability that deception was ever your intent. Don’t tell them you were unemployed for a year — say you were free-lance editing, because of that one time you helped proofread your friend’s thesis and they gave you an endorsement on Linkedin for it. Don’t post pictures of yourself at parties, even if those parties are the only times you’ve ever felt relaxed and at home in your body and all your “professional” photos make you want to vomit. Set up a system of locks and barriers to keep your personal life from ever becoming public, even if it means you’re afraid to put a bumper sticker on your car endorsing your favorite presidential candidate, because you don’t want to risk losing your job over your political beliefs, do you?
In the end it’s not really any different from being a cashier whose boss is a racist. That’s not the dream I went back to school to pursue.
There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy, although I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who remembers it. Privacy is closing the door; secrecy is locking it. Privacy is saying “I’d rather not tell you that,” and secrecy is lying to avoid doing so. I have a great need of privacy. I get nervous if I feel observed, so I prefer to be left alone while I work. If someone happens to see my writing in an unfinished state, I’ll sometimes scrap it immediately after. Attention, even positive or neutral attention, sometimes feels toxic to me; it fills me with an urge to hide. I don’t know whether this is an autistic trait or simply a manifestation of introversion, but either way, the solution is privacy, not secrecy. My unfinished writing isn’t secret, but I do need you to be patient and wait for it to be finished. What I’m working on isn’t secret; I’ll be happy to answer your questions once I’ve taken a break. And yes, you can have a tour of the house, but please don’t go into that room right now.
Secrecy operates under the assumption that other people want to know, and it’s up to me to thwart those seekers and thus control their knowledge. Privacy assumes that we humans are largely uninterested in seeing the results of one another’s colonoscopies. “This is private” could just as likely mean “You probably don’t want to know” as “I don’t want you to know.” Throughout my life other people have been far more upset at me for sharing my personal experiences with them than I have been at having one of my secrets found out at the wrong time. When it comes to secrets coming out, often the fear is far, far worse than the humiliation. You may as well just spill it and get it over with.
Let me give you an example.
When I was 22, my then-partner got a new job after a spell of unemployment, and celebrated by buying a decent DSLR camera. We had a lot of fun that summer taking pictures of sunsets and wooded trails, but we also took some extremely nude pictures of one another, including a few of ourselves engaged in sex acts. The digital photos were saved to a disk, which I labeled in code and hid in the back of my portable CD case. The tension that those photos created just by existing was titilating enough on its own; I never had to actually look at them. Then we broke up. I moved out. We’d been living together for well over a year, so one of the hardest parts was going through every room trying to tease my own possessions out of the corners, and salvage them from our failed joint household. Some things got left behind. Some things I stole with the self-righteous naivete of fresh heartbreak. And when the dust of that whole thing settled, I realized with horror that I couldn’t find that disk with the nude photos on it.
It could be anywhere.
Now that I’m openly trans and genderqueer and writing about it online, I find it amusing that the thought of my nudes leaking ever felt particularly threatening. Even as a chronic insomniac, I think I could count the number of hours of sleep I’ve lost over those photos on one hand. For the next few years, I adjusted to the knowledge that “leaked nudes” was a possible element of my future, and I got used to it while working as a gas station cashier with a racist boss. Living in fear of a leaked nude is a bit like driving without a seatbelt: the longer you get away with it, the less it scares you. By the time I found that CD in the bottom of an old box, I’d already lost most of my shame.
So if you’re wondering why I mostly use one identity, without trying to keep any particular aspect of my life fully separated from any other, at the risk of losing social and economic standing? The answer is: at this point I’m just used to it, and I’ve gotten away with it so far. Could I be making a big mistake? Yes, of course. I make a lot of mistakes, and this could easily be one of them. But I think I’ve got more important things to worry about at this point.
Thank you for reading.
