The short version is that there's something called a morality clause in my employment contract. Basically, while academic freedom is absolutely a thing my university stands by, there are a few areas where they pretty explicitly say it doesn't apply. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morals_...
And believe it or not? I don't actually blame my university administration for insisting on this as part of our union contract. Over the last decade I've been at my university, we've had not one, not two, but *three* tenured professors who were fired for cause because of absolutely batshit stuff--
--that they said and did. One prof got canned for screaming at students in the hallway & comparing notes with them on their respective weekend binge drinking. One prof got canned during lockdowns for calling his students "vectors of disease" & much, much worse, on camera and while being recorded.
And one? One made *international-level news* for the scale and scope of his antisemitism and racism, when the student newspaper uncovered it. We're talking Jewish space lasers-level here, astrophysicist who denies black holes exist-level stuff. Yeah. *Yeah*.
So like... I get it. That's a lot of very public embarrassment for one rural, mid-sized teaching university to deal with in less than a decade. The admin clamping down a bit and making sure there's a method to yeet profs who are wayyyyy out of pocket is basic institutional self-defense.
But it also means that there's certain subjects that I simply do not feel safe talking about publicly, especially in the current political climate. And then, when you add the fact that I'm on the ace spectrum and that sex is a very, very personal and vulnerable thing for me? Yeah. It's tough.
Anyway, that's the story. This is why I'm more reserved on certain things than most other trans creators, despite the fact that I'm relentlessly sex-positive and have found a few ways to dance around the outside edges of those restrictions. One of the reasons I hate American puritanism. 😞
I completely understand, but I also think this is a big reason why protecting your anonymity on the internet is important. Google and Facebook convinced a lot of people to just be online with their IRL persona, but I very much think that's just not a good idea.
The last prof? The guy with the antisemitism? He'd been pretty damn good with hiding his identity. Our student newspaper just kicks ass. So, yeah. Even under a pseudonym, I'm not taking the chance.
Yeah, I was thinking over my last message while doing something else, and it's scarily easy to find someone's identity. I'm pretty careful, but even then I can think of ways to pretty easily find my real name. And after that, everything else is easy.
Yup. That's why I use a pseudonym, but make no real effort to hide who I am. 99%+ of potential harassment can be deterred by the extra half hour of legwork it'd take to identify me in detail, and the rest wouldn't be stopped no matter what I did. Anonymity on the net is a myth. Always has been.