Too Exposed to Expose?

So…

Why did I re-run that 12 1/2-year-old piece about Judge Frye and her dogs over at ENDABlog?  Because of this:

Ramseyer wasn’t using internet anonymity in order to be mean.

Its connection to my 1998 Frye piece will become a bit more apparent below, but that line appeared in a Feb. 22-dated piece of santorum, in The Stranger (ironic given the origin of the noun “santorum“?  not really, but more on that below), and it came from a scrivener of Laurel Ramseyer, a character named Dominic Holden. 

And it came nearly two months after Washington state-based Laurel Ramseyer, in character as “Lurleen,” got into one of her patented gay-marriage-primacy fits and, in an yet another unsuccessful attempt to show that gay marriage in states such as New Hampshire that have gay-only rights laws but no trans rights law somehow helps trans people, touted her connection to the group Equal Rights Washington while attempting to pull rank on Pennsylvania-based trans activist Kathy Padilla.

We all know where that led.

Oh wait…

We actually all don’t know.   What Ramseyer did to herself – not to mention to Kathy – is off-limits for discussion at Pam’s House Blend, Bilerico and the rest of the InsidersOut blogs.

Unless you knew that Kathy had blogged at PHB over the last five years, you’d have no way of knowing that – much less a reason for inquiring about whether – she had ever been there.  Lurleen, though, continues to pontificate there – unabated and unscathed – both as blogger and as moderator.

Without any attempt to communicate with Kathy, Laurel Ramseyer completely and permanently erased Kathy’s presence at PHB on Jan. 1.  Continued refusal by Ramseyer and others involved with PHB to engage in any level of good faith communication with Kathy (much less any offers of apology – something, interestingly, that Ramseyer, in character as “Lurleen,” has had no problem doing to members of the christianist right) led to the publicizing a few days later – here at ENDABlog – of the fact that “Lurleen” is indeed just a sockpuppet identity of Ramseyer.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon, Feb. 21:

Monday, 3:08 pm CST:

From: Dominic Holden [dholden@thestranger.com]

I’m writing an article today about the Laurel/Lurleen hubbub and I’d like to get your take. Can you please call me? Thanks!

Dominic Holden
News Editor, The Stranger
O: (206) [XXX-XXXX] M: (206) [XXX-XXXX ]

Lets see…

Ramseyer is based in Seattle, which is home of The Stranger, which is home to that wonderfully trans-supportive (if, by “trans-supportive,” one means “transphobic turd”) Dan Savage.

The only apology I have made – or ever will make – with respect to connecting the dots that Ramseyer herself placed out onto the internet for connecting was to Kathy, for briefly pulling my initial ENDABlog post after being given the woe-is-Laurel sob story and, I am ashamed to admit, buying it.  It seemed like it might be a plausible story even while amounting to a level of gross negligence that no jury would excuse in either civil or criminal litigation – but I had nagging suspicions (hence the reason I didn’t erase the post) about the matter and I felt as though I was betraying Kathy.

I should have listened to those nagging suspicions then.

I had no intention of making that same mistake again on Monday Feb. 21.

I replied to Dominic Holden on that Monday, at 4:36 pm, CST:

What is your deadline? I’m tentatively willing to speak with you about it (though tomorrow would actually be a better day and even that might be a bit dicey with my scheduling, but I’ll try), but my main concern is the degree to which the point of view of Kathleen – the person whose erasure from PHB by Ms. Ramseyer preceiptated the entire mess – will be presented. Pam Spaulding adamantly refused to allow the matter to be discussed openly at PHB, not only giving a de facto pass to what Ms. Ramseyer did but also effectively engaging in on-the-fly revision of LGBT history. So, I have to ask whose input you’ve gotten thus far and who all else you’re planning to seek input from?

I do have one other concern as well. I am curious as to how you happened to contact me about this story. From the “KatRose” in the subject line I presume that you simply e-mailed me off of my ID info on PHB. I hope you’re aware of what I’ve had to say about the matter at ENDABlog.

http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/no-special-rights-for-sockpuppets/

http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/this-post-doesnt-exist/

And if we can’t cross paths either via phone or again via e-mail that should fill in all blanks that I could fill in via interview. At the very least I can e-mail you PDFs of what the PHB page in question looked like prior to Kathleen being erased.

Katrina Rose

His reponse, timestamped 5:06 pm, CST:

Thanks for writing back. To answer your questions:

I’m writing the article today.

That doesn’t tell me what his deadline is – and, even if it did, think about it in relation to what he says below.

I’ve been able to reach Laurel, Josh Friedes, and a member of the faculty at Poynter. I’ve seen your post and the stuff over at KnowThyNeighbor.

I did get your contact info off the PHB website.

I’m not sure how much I will get into the profile deleting since I haven’t written the piece yet.

So, at that point he hadn’t written it yet.  He had, however, been in contact with the pro-Ramseyer camp and a faculty member at a journalism school.

Hope this helps.

Dominic Holden

Well, it said a lot – not, of course, about when his deadline was.  (It was seeming to be lucky for him  – me? – that I just happened not to be out of town doing research and, as happens roughtly half the time I’m on the road these days, sans access to the internet for an afternoon and/or evening when his initial post-pro-Ramseyer-camp-consultation e-mail came in, eh?)

I slept on it, and on Tuesday at 7:49 am CST, I responded:

Let me elaborate on my concern then. Part of it is that I am going to come off sounding as though I’m telling you how to your job; I assure you that I don’t like it when someone does that to me – be it whether I’m wearing my lawyer hat or my teaching hat or my research hat – so I apologize in advance if that’s what this sounds like. I do, however, hope that when you look at all of the evidence, you’ll take this fully into account – and if you do, I don’t see how it would not have a significant impact on the precise curvature of how your article arcs.

Ultimately, there’s no way around the fact that Kathleen’s erasure (and that’s key: her comments and ID weren’t simply deleted; she was completely erased – and there is now no evidence, other than some peripheral mentions of her in other people’s comments, that she ever had any presence on that site) from Pam’s House Blend precipitated all with which Ms. Ramseyer doubtlessly is using to paint herself as the aggrieved party (unless one wants to say that Ms. Ramseyer’s precursor actions with respect to wanting to have her cake and eat it to in terms of publicity and privacy are actually ‘event zero’.) I can even forward you an e-mail from Pam Spaulding (who, according to Kathleen, has never seen fit to communicate with Kathleen directly about what happened) in which Pam agrees with my timeline of events.

As I mentioned, while I am available today, it will be off and on; I work in a writing clinic most of today and I teach part of tomorrow. Just try to get in touch via phone; if it happens to be at a bad time, we can try again – and, if nothing else, we can try to do this via e-mail in between my intermittent duties.

[I thereafter included my phone number]

[NOTE: After I posted this, Kathleen told me that eventually Pam did make some effort to communicate with her.]

I never received another response from him.

And then…

She moved to Seattle about five years ago, but it wasn’t until 2009 that I first noticed her. She was giving hell to a man named Gary Randall, president of the Faith and Freedom Network, who was drumming up an anti-gay campaign in Washington State. She outed his finances. She outed his associates. She outed his history of mounting homophobic campaigns while paying himself a lavish salary.The hits kept coming. Blogging under the pseudonym “Lurleen” at Pam’s House Blend, she screamed bloody murder when backers of an anti-gay referendum reported only their donors’ initials, instead of the full names required by state disclosure rules. She went to their anti-gay rallies, took photos, blogged it all.

“I was pretty sure that the opposition was reading what I was writing,” Lurleen says, explaining her decision not to write under her real name online. “I decided early on to use a pseudonym or pen name, because I wanted to feel out the territory first.”

In midsummer 2009, when a battle over domestic-partnership rights was raging in Washington, Randall linked to a list of gay politicians on a blog that advised readers to use the list “first as a precursor for additional investigation before taking ‘direct action.’ ;-)”

“This was sort of like skinhead territory,” Lurleen reflects. “If he thought it was okay to link to something like that, I felt that maybe I had made a wise decision to keep my identity quiet. Nobody else was poking the opposition daily like I was.”

She succeeded in keeping her identity secret for years, until recently. On January 19, Randall hit back against his nemesis, writing on his blog: “‘Lurleen’ is Laurel Ramseyer.”

How did he find her real name? It wasn’t with help from like-minded agitators on the right. Instead, it was with help from gay and transgender bloggers, who revealed Lurleen’s identity earlier this year. Leading the charge: transgender activist Katrina Rose, who announced on ENDAblog, “I’m outing her here as having committed an egregious act of transphobic cyber-bullying…”

The “egregious act”?

Ramseyer once deleted the profile of a commenter who alluded to her true identity in a comment thread on Pam’s House Blend, wiping that commenter’s entire history off the website. Ramseyer says it was an accident—she was just trying to delete the one comment.

Those are the first nine paragraphs of a 16-paragraph piece.

And here we have the connection to my 1998 column about Judge Frye and her dogs.  For then, I was playing the same role that Holden played here.

Well, I’m sure most of you are thinking, that’s obvious.  You’re both playing the role of author.

No, we were both playing the role of scrivener.  In that 1998 Texas Triangle column, even though I added a few thoughts of my own, I was essentially a conduit for what Phyllis had to say about what she and her spouse went through when one of their two dogs died.  There really was no opposing point of view – and I even had some relevant first-hand knowledge of some of the facts at issue (as noted in the piece: I already knew Phyllis, her spouse and the dogs – and I knew that one had developed health troubles.)

I’m pretty sure that I approached Phyllis about writing the piece and my quotes from her came either from e-mails from her or from one of her Phyllabuster e-blasts (or a combination of both), though, 12+ years down the line I can’t say I remember.

I do remember – and still know and still acknowledge – that that piece was not “journalism” in any sense of the word.  My intent was to be honest, of course, and to be accurate as best I could (as mentioned above: I even had some relevant first-hand knowledge of some of the facts at issue), though that was no different than any non-satire opinion piece I wrote then or write now. 

But, there was no true objectivity

Even in simply relaying a friend’s feelings about the loss of a pet, there was advocacy there on my part (Phyllis’s too for that matter.)

Yes, my intent was to be as honest and as accurate as best I could – which is where my act of Cinton-era scrivening parts company with Holden’s 2011 variety.

But the bigger, underlying motivation seems to be a belief that Ramseyer was complicit in a massive gay conspiracy.

So now we have yet another word that has lost all utility via incessant (mis)use as a rhetorical battering ram.  First off, I hope every one notices that Holden makes no mention of gay blog consotium InsidersOut.  Second, everything written about what Ramseyer did with Spaulding’s approval and with Sandeen’s (and others’) apologism is about what Ramseyer did with Spaulding’s approval and with Sandeen’s (and others’) apologism.  In other words, its about at least two LGBT activists working in concert in what they see as the best interests of the movement.  The fact that they’re dead wrong is, here, immaterial; they were working together….

which, when last I checked, is something that is supposed to take place within LGBT activism.

Right?

“Gay Inc.,” as some LGBT bloggers call it, is ostensibly a well-heeled national network willing to fight for marriage rights for homosexuals while leaving behind—and even rejecting—equal rights for transgender people. Rose wrote that people involved with “Gay Inc.” are willing to “bypass trans equality and move on to the non-trans issue of gay marriage.”

Way to contextualize, dude.  (And, no, I’m not claiming that the quote is out of context. I’m declaring that Holden’s entire micro-discussion of the relationshp between the permanently-employed gay elite, gay marriage and trans rights is as substantive as a paramecium’s brain.)

And what, allegedly, links Ramseyer to “Gay Inc.”?

In addition to her blogging, Ramseyer had been volunteering for Equal Rights Washington (ERW), a statewide LGBT equality group that was working to uphold the domestic-partnership law (it successfully defeated Randall’s anti-gay campaign in November 2009). After that win, Ramseyer became ERW’s volunteer new-media director. This, apparently, made her a tool.

I guess that people can be of different minds as to whether that makes her a “tool.”   But, it certainly casts doubt on whether what someone who has any skills that would qualify one as “new-media director” for any organization did in completely erasing someone’s existence from a major LGBT blog was actually an accident.

Regardless of whether it was paranoid conspiracy theories or long-standing grudges that motivated her outing, being exposed was probably inevitable, says Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. “The hacking community can almost always figure out who you are,” McBride says. “There are some people who have valuable contributions who need to be anonymous, but I see most people abusing anonymity to just be mean.”

I presume that different people have different definitions of what constitutes “hacking.”  However, if it includes doing two simple Google searches, then I think that the “hacking community” would include pretty much everyone on the planet except my mother (given that she seems to be the last person standing who refuses to get a computer.)

In this case, though, Ramseyer wasn’t using internet anonymity in order to be mean.

Seriously?

She was using it in order to protect herself while she aggressively fought for gay rights. “I never in my wildest dreams expected a small group of people in the LGBT community to do something nasty to me,” Ramseyer says. “I always expected it to come from the opposition.

That’s the entirety of the piece – a piece that, for some reason, had to be published within hours after Holden’s first attempt to contact me after lining all of his pro-Ramseyer ducks in a row after this having been out on the internet for the better part of two months.

Trust me Dom, it wasn’t going to go away.

Of course, maybe it would have…

unless someone didn’t want it to.  Ethan St. Pierre made some pointed summations about Ramseyer and The Stranger‘s hack-tastic anti-journalusm:

1) The fact is that Lurleen was never outed, she wasn’t really hiding.

2) If she thought her life was in danger, why would she be bringing this all back up again and in a much more public spotlight, in the City where she fears for her life?

3) She is a lying sack of shit.

Uh oh…

Facts were referenced!

That’s a violation of the prime gay directive!

And that, folks, is what has bewildered me most about this.  If the comments to Holden’s piece are even remotely representative, the LGB(T) community has now become as impervious to facts as Glenn Beck’s fan base is – and that makes me fear that we have lost.

Lost what?

Lost everything.

There are several themes to the comments.  Transphobia, of course, is there in all its forms (including a gay doctor who opposes legitimate medical treatment for transsexuals yet somehow thinks he’s not a kissin’ cousin of Janice Raymond, Paul McHugh and Lou Sheldon.)  But the most disturbing theme is encapsulated by the the title of this ENDABlog post. 

For even some of the commenters who did bother looking at the facts that Holden didn’t believe his readers needed to have come to a bizarre conclusion: Even if what Ramseyer did was wrong, she still shouldn’t have been exposed because of the potential detriment to her and the precarious immigration status of her spouse, yadda yadda yadda…

Yes, I presumed that Dominic Holden was going to do a hatchet job – I just didn’t figure it would be motorized and inserted into my anal cavity while I was asleep on Monday night.

I presumed that some trans-haters would emerge to defend the cyber chastity of Our Lady “Lurleen” – I just didn’t figure how many it would be and that it would include trans people (such as one increasingly clueless FTM.)

What I didn’t presume – and what I still find hard to fathom – is the degree to which the LGB(T) movement has become impervious to facts. Conversing with them is like talking to a Republican congressman or a Fox News reporter or a certain knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“Look, you stupid Bastard. You’ve got no arms left!” is countered with “Yes I have!”

“Hey Cathy Brennan, I just quoted what you said 10 years ago and I didn’t just quote it in context, I quoted it in full and with all of the other items that it appeared next to – and, oh by the way, nothing about what you said was true about trans law in Maryland was true then and nothing has since come true” is met with “I just hate stacked decks.”

“I just provided you with all of the primary source material which proves that Laurel Ramseyer brought all of this on herself” is met with “Deleting internet history is not a valid reason for putting someone in danger. Regardless of how ‘valid’ the perceived biases are.”

So here we have it: The gay community has learned not from its own history but from Wall Street.

Wall Street ‘banks’ became ‘too big to fail.’

Laurel Ramseyer became ‘too susceptible to danger to be questioned.’

In other words, she was too exposed to expose.

And the rest of the movement is licking up the pus which oozes from that thought process, thinking it is Dom Perignon, and cannot be convinced otherwise even when shown how green and non-bubbly it is.

Hey nonny noo….

The fact that no one here or anywhere else on the internet would have known about any of this had Laurel Ramseyer not posted her own information about those things on the internet and then attempted to pull activism rank on people with whom she disagreed in blog threads….?

Oh yeh…facts.

Damn.

This is really sad. Laurel is one of the greatest assets to our community and was a secret weapon during 71. She dragged the hypocrites kicking and screaming out into the light by exposing their wife-beating and tax-evading secrets. And now someone within the larger national community outs her out of some crazy opinion?? It’s just dumb, seriously idiotic. I know Katrina Rose will read this, so let me say here – congratulations – your dumb notions have hurt someone who is a tremendous asset to the LGBT community. You should be ashamed of yourself. Sad and pathetic.

Fact-free “floofy.”

Well, actually, context-free.

Isn’t it interesting how Holden was able to create the impression that I and/or Kathy and/or anyone else went after her because of anything she did in Washington that was pro-marriage and/or pro-LGBT?  And isn’t it even more interesting how all of what she may well have done is supposed to be her pre-absolution for something along the lines of what she did to Kathy?

And isn’t it even more interesting still that the pro-Ramseyer chorus has no interest whatsoever in the actual underlying facts?

It took until the tenth comment for anyone to say anything remotely reality-based:

Where is the rest of this story? Seems like there is a lot missing, like the other side, what comments she deleted, tons more details. I’m not saying that what you wrote was wrong, just that I got to the end of the article and I don’t really feel like I have the whole story. You’re not being a Credulous Hack™ are you?

That met with a comment from someone whose ID is one letter removed from the word “putz”:

I wouldn’t have minded a short interview with Katrina Rose in here either. “By outing Lurleen, Katrina, you have made it more difficult for her to report on anti-gay groups activities. So, do you think you’re a hero then, you jackass?” Something like that.

The song of St. Ramseyer.

What exactly would have St. Ramseyer needed to do in order to met with near-“putz”‘s approval for outing her?  Actually, the better question would be: What exactly would have St. Ramseyer needed to do to a trans person in order to met with near-“putz”‘s approval for outing her?

Clearly, based on the overall body of comments, the two different questions have different answers.

In fact, the clear implication is that any gay person who claims to have the best interests of ‘the community’ at heart can do anything to any trans person and outing (even, like here, when it really isn’t outing because the person is already out because she was never actually in) can never be justified.

And it doesn’t take too much cynicism (particularly in light of the decade-aged arrogance of Cathy Brennan and the others who were involved in erecting third-class status for trans people in Maryland using outright lies as legislative brick and rhetorical mortar) to go further and conclude that no trans person is viewed as having any right to even say anything about anything that a gay person might do to adversely affect her or her people, much less expect said gay person to pay any price whatsoever for the harm caused.

Mati Abernathey chimed in with yet another dose of blasphemy facts:

LOL, nice slant on the so called facts. Next time do your homework before you post, unless you’re trying to write fiction. Lurleen is a blogger/moderator at PHB and DELETED Kathy Padilla’s entire profile FOR ASKING IF SHE HAD A PROFESSIONAL INTEREST. That’s all. And she posted her picture at PHB and ERW. Not much of a hidden profile. She deleted five years of history from PHB because Kathy asked a question. Kathy has a long history of activism in the GLBT community and simply for questioning if she had a proffessional interest in moving marriage rights ahead of LGBT rights. Gays and lesbians can still be discriminated in many states. This isn’t just about trans rights, but the legislative priorities of GayInc. They’re more concerned with marriage rights, than employment rights.

You all can joke about GayInc, but where’s the story in the GayINC blogs about the transgender bill in Maryland that has the trans blogosphere on fire? Bilerico? No. PHB? No. All InsidersOUT blogs. Coincidence? I think not.

After a couple of other blasphemous fact-based  comments from Marti and another commenter or two (interspersed with plenty of fact-free noise), we have Gay Anti-History Nonsense 101 in the form of “Womyn2me”:

Mzmartipants, you need to calm the fuck down.

Every gain that gays and lesbians have made has positively impacted trans people. Why should we stop our momentum to accomodate the trans foot stamping that the rest of the community isnt caring enough about them?

Talk about throwing the fruity baby out with the tranny bathwater.

Eventually, Dom steps in to slantedly silence those who wanted to hear from someone other than pro-Ramseyer mouthpieces:

Katrina Rose did not respond to two requests to comment, except to send an email saying that the article should include information about erasing the person’s profile on Pam’s House Blend. And the article does that.

I wonder where this clown got his journalism credentials.

 To quote one of Cathy Brennan’s new favorite phrases (only, I’ll be using it appropriately): Talk about a stacked deck.  Folks, you all go back and look at the time line of my communications with the dishonest piece of garbage.  He had no intention whatsoever of telling Seattle what actually happened – but that wouldn’t have likely mattered anyway.

As I’ve noted.

Clearly, the LGB(T) readers of that piece demonstrate a degree of imperviousness to facts that I’m not sure I’ve even seen even on FOX ‘News’ or at Teabagger rallies.

The following was my initial response on the comment thread there.  To Mr. Holden, I stated:

Excuse me. I didn’t call you on the phone. However, I did e-mail you twice and provided you with my phone number. I see no incoming calls from 206 that I missed.

Perhaps there is one question I should have asked you directly, namely: Are you intending to do a one-sided, pro-Laurel Ramseyer non-journalistic hack job? I didn’t ask it because, deep down, I just presumed that that was what was in the offing. I guess it is nice to know that my intuition is as good as my knowledge of what the term “outing” means. As the Princess Bride fan above points out, clearly you have as little comprehension of its meaning as Ms. Ramseyer and her defenders seem to have. You can’t be outed if you’re out.

(Someone had appropriated the second most famous quote from the legendary fictional Spaniard Inigo Montoya, and substituted the word “outing” for the word “inconceivable.”)

I added:

BTW – If anyone is interested in seeing what actually transpired (I know…facts are so unfashionable in a FOX world; I mean, “Every gain that gays and lesbians have made has positively impacted trans people”? That might as well have come from Glenn Beck’s ass – or gay legal philosophy from Maryland, ca. 2001), how about actually reading the ENDABlog posts in question?

http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/01…

http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/04…

http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/11…

http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/17…

In response to someone who may well have been attempting to be constructive by suggesting that Kathy’s PHB history be retrieved from the WayBackMachine, I wrote:

Despite it not being perfect, the WayBackMachine is one of my favorite research tools. One of its imperfections is not being able to go back for things that are only a few minutes old.

“I’ve read all 78 comments and am still confused…”

The reasons for this are that (1) Mr. Holden was simply acting as Laurel Ramseyer’s scrivener in writing this piece; and (2) most of the commenters are accepting the notion that Mr. Holden’s piece is even in the same time zone as ‘journalism.’

Here is something that a ‘journalist’ could have conveyed in a piece about this matter if he was actually interested in doing something other than a fifth-rate hack job that wouldn’t even make the cut on the gossip page at the New York Post.

– “jpmassar” posted the item “New Hampshire to LGBTs: Happy New Year! Now Die” ( http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/1834… ) at Pam’s House Blend. In the view of myself, Kathleen and some others, the post mischaracterized the legal position of trans people in the state of New Hampshire.

– I took issue with it on that PHB thread – more vocally than any of the others. Kathleen occasionally chimed in as well.

– “Lurleen,” and others, took issue with my interpretation of the legal issues in question; all in all, nothing unusual given that a disturbing number of non-Ts in the LGBT movement really don’t like to see the operational apartheid of gay-only rights laws spelled out – and they really, really don’t like to be reminded of just how unseemly it is for a state that has such a gay-only rights law apartheid to bypass trans equality and move on to the non-trans issue of gay marriage.

– Sometime during the afternoon of Jan. 1, one of “Lurleen”‘s comments prompted Kathleen to ask – simply and tastefully – if Lurleen had a professional interest in the gay marriage issue.

– “Lurleen”‘s response itself was neither inherently distasteful nor mean nor inappropriate toward Kathleen, but ”Lurleen” did explictly mention having a connection to Equal Rights Washington and, furthermore, made a *specific* claim to not be a sockpuppet.

– Kathleen thereafter looked on ERW’s website and found that the only person listed who was making a claim to a connection to PHB – as a ‘front page blogger’ no less – was someone named Laurel Ramseyer.

– Upon noticing that, Kathleen posed a question on the ongoing PHB thread – without openly connecting “Lurleen” and Laurel – as to whether someone with the background listed under ‘Laurel Ramseyer’ on the ERW site might have some sort of conflict in claiming not to have a vested interest in the marriage position she was taking on the PHB thread.

– Soon after, and without any advance warning or explanation afterward, Kathleen wasn’t merely banned from PHB; the comment in which she posed the question AND her entire presence on the site was erased.

– Kathleen informed me of what happened and then passed along what she thought was the connection: “Lurleen” to Laurel.

– Just by chance, I had left the browser on my upstairs desktop computer open to the page containing the “jpmassar” NH thread, refreshed at a point with much (though not all) of the “Lurleen”-Kathleen back-and-forth still present (my PDF dump of the page at that point can be found here: http://endablog.files.wordpress.com/2011… ; again: this does contain what led up to the question Kathleen posed, but not the question itself.)

– I did two google searches on the open internet and found the even-more-obvious connection between “Lurleen” and Laurel.

– I started the first ENDABlog post on this matter (http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/01…) just the first few lines of it, stating that I was aware that something was up (hence the rather weird title of the thing- which, hopefully, now makes sense), but still with hopes that there had just been the sort of “accident” that Ramseyer claims it was (a claim that Mr. Holden uncritically accepts.)

– When repeated efforts by Kathleen even to get an explanation as to what happened failed, she gave me the thumbs-up to go ahead and publicize the matter (via an amending of that first ENDABlog post, and the second one: http://endablog.wordpress.com/2011/01/04… )

– At some point thereafter, Laurel e-mailed me with a demand to take the post down, asserting that the information therein was private – despite the fact that all I had done to get to the point where I could make that connection was do an initial google search with the terms “Laurel Ramseyer” and “Lurleen”, something no one in the pro-LGBT camp llikely would have even thought about doing had she herself not, as “Lurleen”, touted her connection to ERW in an attempt to one-up Kathleen on that PHB thread – while claiming to not be a sockpuppet (in at least one post at PHB, as “Lurleen” she had posted an online petition which contained the names of several signatories – one being Laurel Ramseyer.)

Laurel Ramseyer outed herself. She threw a hissy-fit when people noticed. And now she’s found a FOX-quality ‘journalist’ from teh same paper that lets Dan Davage spew his shit to the four winds to take her side.

After this, finally someone made some attempt to do what Dominic Holden didn’t want his readers to be able to do: get the facts.  From “qwertyuiop”:

Okay, here’s the critical piece.

– Sometime during the afternoon of Jan. 1, one of “Lurleen”‘s comments prompted Kathleen to ask – simply and tastefully – if Lurleen had a professional interest in the gay marriage issue.

Fair question, but please, I really doubt there’s a way that you can do this “simply and tastefully”.

– “Lurleen”‘s response itself was neither inherently distasteful nor mean nor inappropriate toward Kathleen, but ”Lurleen” did explictly mention having a connection to Equal Rights Washington and, furthermore, made a *specific* claim to not be a sockpuppet.

So, she made claims to have a vague connection to a large group.

– Kathleen thereafter looked on ERW’s website and found that the only person listed who was making a claim to a connection to PHB – as a ‘front page blogger’ no less – was someone named Laurel Ramseyer.

Makes sense so far.

– Upon noticing that, Kathleen posed a question on the ongoing PHB thread – without openly connecting “Lurleen” and Laurel – as to whether someone with the background listed under ‘Laurel Ramseyer’ on the ERW site might have some sort of conflict in claiming not to have a vested interest in the marriage position she was taking on the PHB thread.

Okay, here’s I think where you messed up. You could have sent her a private message asking about her identity, or made any sort of reply that didn’t include her real name but expounded on her confessed connections to ERW. No matter how ‘easy’ it seemed to you to discover her real identity, it’s poor internet etiquette to post real names and thereby ‘out’ people. Period.

Posting real names changes how google views someone. It opens them up to all sorts of real life attacks. I’m not saying that it should never be done, but it should be done extremely carefully – and the quick, careless way that you did this, here, suggests that you’re not as internet-savvy as you claim to be trans-savvy, with dangerous consequences.

and Kat pounds her head on the keyboard…

and Kat pounds her head on the keyboard…

and Kat pounds her head on the keyboard…

and Kat pounds her head on the keyboard…

Even what began as an attempt to deal with the matter with facts instead of dogma and catechisms from the Cult of St. Ramseyer ends up being so close to “too exposed to expose” that the two become all but indistinguishable.

With that, I must depart – though I do highly recommend that all who have any interest in the facts underlying this situation tune into Trans FM on Sunday night.

Those who are impervious to facts likely will remain so, but those who actually have some interest in finding out what sort of chicanery is going on right under your noses (and in between your pixels) may find yourselves enlightened to the point where you may no longer view me as being cynical.

Really.