Happy 4th July! The future of independence

We’re living in interesting times. We are seeing faster change than ever before, and we get to decide the next few steps humans make towards the future. What a privilege! On this day more than any, it is a time to celebrate freedom and independence, but we must appreciate their value if we are not to risk losing them..

I wrote in 2016 that we need to make sure we preserve independence of thought, and two years on, that seems even more important as people retreat into bubbles. If existing tensions between opposing bubbles continue to increase, conflict is increasingly likely. Indeed it is not uncommon to hear people  fools state how ready they already are for it, gearing up for a fight for their flavor of civilization. If we can’t dismantle the bubbles, then one way of living peacefully side by side after the conflict might be  to consider a dual democracy.

Dangers to freedom and independence are many and diverse.

Increasing surveillance presents a different kind of danger. As AI becomes ever more powerful, our activities and thoughts will be monitored even more intimately and in more detail. Information gathered can be used to manipulate you, and the tools there are already pretty sophisticated. Philosophers have always discussed free will, but it will be under increasing attack. Preserving independence of mind will become more difficult.

Large global corporations and wealthy individuals also have a lot of control via the ability to build, rent or buy these control mechanisms, with blatant advertising at one end and sophisticated bots at the other, and that’s only today.

On top of that, we also have ceding more and more power to activists, who bypass normal democratic due process to enforce change by threatening and bullying people into submission. Mob rule is already threatening democracy and the rule of law. Terror of being attacked by online mobs on twitter or Facebook also causes self censorship of both actions and words, and soon increasing surveillance could extend that to thinking. Many people already feel they are losing freedom thanks to this sort of mob rule. As often noted in such debate, 1984 was not meant to be a guide book.

AI can up-skill activists to make them even more effective. A less unlikely threat from AI is an AI uprising, though it’s possible that we could implement AI-based governance, with AI’s threatening us with all sorts of consequences if we misbehave, Forbin Project style.

A more futuristic independence issue is space based groups. We recent saw Arcadia anoint its first chief. Will we see Mars colonies declare independence? Probably, but when?

We see seemingly contradictory demands for independence too. Californians sometimes talk about becoming independent, but many Californians also want to remove border controls and effectively let anyone walk in. In fact, a lot of people across the USA and Europe support having open borders. Old-fashioned warfare between countries can result in a rapid change of governance and culture, but such wars in the West are thankfully unlikely for the time being. However, over decades open borders could greatly change demographic and democratic makeup and culture as effectively as an invasion, albeit very gradually. That may very well bring welcome change – America has been a highly successful collection of diverse immigrants ever since the second Indian ancestor set foot there – but from a strictly independence point of view, is it not still a challenge to Independence if you give away control to others, however gradually?

Globalization by definition cedes local independence to belonging to global communities. The people witnessing the Declaration of Independence all those years ago probably never imagined that one day people might see themselves not as Americans but as part of a global community, eager to wipe away borders and let people everywhere roam where they want, under some sort of unspecified global order. Who will control it? Who will write and enforce the rules? A globally scaled European Commission? That is how the EU sees itself, as a model for future world government, and there are 500 million Europeans. Will the USA become just a colony of a distantly run empire again?

Just a few thoughts. I’m done.

Happy 4th July!

 

Freedom!

What a glorious day for the UK!

After a long and bitter fight with far too much unnecessary nastiness, the UK finally voted to walk away from the dead weight of the slowest growing regional economy in the world that was set on a path to inevitable destruction. In doing so, we will certainly now be followed by some other EU countries. Across all the EU, many people did not want to be forced into a United States of Europe, many don’t even want to be part of the EU at all. Now most will be able to demand the choice in their countries too, and some at least will follow. They will likely negotiate free trade deals with one another, without the baggage of political union.

A much smaller EU will be forced to either disband, or reform into a simpler free trade group, and won’t be able to dictate terms to the countries that have left.

After much turbulence and quite a few years, today’s EU will have reformed into a simple free trade block, or possibly three. Northern EU countries don’t share the same values as southern ones, and the new Eastern members may join together or join a North or South European trade block.

Freedom generates better quality of life, enterprise, wealth, and short term financial turbulence is just that, short term. When we emerge, and it will take time, we can all have a better future.

However, the bitterness we saw in this campaign, the lies, fear-mongering, and most of all the offensive name calling will not go away quickly. A lot of damage has been done and resentment built up. We wake to a country facing fantastic new opportunity and freedom, but a country divided. We must now take great care to diffuse that, to restore our traditions of living peacefully and amicably alongside others with whom we disagree. There will likely be more squabbling, there will be demonstrations, more name calling, maybe even some riots as some protest, throws blame, accusations, and stones. That needs good leadership, so it is essential that Cameron and Osborne at the very least are replaced.

Britain has some fine politicians, and some less fine. The campaign has shown clearly which are which. Some MPs on both sides of the campaign and across all parties showed their leadership ability. Some did so while maintaining proper respect for others, always acting with dignity, offering vision and sense, while others offered little more than threats and abuse. With the right leaders in charge, unity can be restored.

It is a different world today. The ripples from this referendum will transform politics across the EU and even the USA. I am excited. We know now that we will be free to do as we will, to run our country as we decide. Division is a very real problem but it can be repaired by good leadership, and together we can make the future genuinely better, not just for the UK, but for the rest of the EU, Norway and Switzerland.

Half the population didn’t get what they wanted, but the right decision was made and they will still reap the benefits even if they didn’t predict them. Provided of course that they accept the new situation positively and we can all work together again.

We can do that. This morning, the short term forecast is for unsettled weather, but the long term future looks great for everyone.

The future of liberty

I was born in 1960. I had an enjoyable childhood, my friends and I doing all the sorts of things young boys did then – playing games, climbing trees, exploring, building hideouts, making dams, vandalizing derelict houses, making crop circles, playing with knives and matches and so on. I was free, and I enjoyed life to the full. I never did anyone any significant harm at all, and had a ball of a time until I discovered girls. Even then, it was only a slow and partial decline into the complexity and mixed emotions of adulthood.

In some ways I envy the kids of today with their access to the net and computers and high-tech, but I don’t envy them at all in terms of liberty. I don’t think the world is anything like as free as it was. Oppression lurks everywhere. Playgrounds are censored of anything remotely dangerous. Games are rapidly being censored of hard contact, and of competition. School lunch boxes are being checked to make sure they don’t contain sugary snacks. Salt, fat, and sugar levels in foods are all being reduced, entire food groups oppressed, everything in an increasing range of national restaurant or sandwich chains has to be Halal. Soon we’ll all have to live on lettuce.

It is almost impossible to buy a wide range of chemicals that used to be freely available, and even though I can understand why, it is still a reduction of freedom. Ditto sharp knives.

Lots of places are blocked off in case a determined kid could hurt themselves, lots of activities cancelled because of insurance and licensing issues, an indirect form of oppression perhaps but a loss of freedom certainly.

Everything online is monitored all the time, by numerous governments and large companies. Most physical activities are likely to be monitored by some CCTV or other. We’d never have dared to do much of what we did if CCTV had been everywhere back then. More importantly, even if a few things we did were technically outlawed, the worst the police would ever have done would be to threaten to tell our parents if we didn’t stop – we never did anything that bad.

Today, kids need to worry about getting a criminal record if they so much as make a nasty comment at another kid, in the playground or online or by text. They don’t have to burn the school down or beat other kids up to get in trouble now. Making a negative comment about someone else’s appearance or gender or sexuality or race or religion is quite enough, and that all adds up to quite a lot of rules for a young kid to keep in mind 24-7. I don’t think there is any exaggeration in saying that a 5-year-old today has to worry far more about their behavior at school than I did until I’d graduated from university.

As a director of my own company, I can write my blogs without any pressure from company brand-enforcers or personnel, and I don’t have to worry about appraisals. Theoretically, nobody tells me what to write. But I still have to self-censor just like everyone else. I have to be very careful how I phrase things if I am writing about any minority, I often have to avoid mentioning unfortunate facts or statistics that might later be considered by someone to put them in a negative light, and I steer well away from some topics altogether. I don’t need to list sensitive topics, you have to be careful around them just as much as I do.

As a kid, I was marginally aware of the existence of the police and the theoretical possibility of being caught if we did something too naughty. For me, it’s only occasionally irritating having to obey the law – I don’t actually want to commit crime anyway, so until recently it was only things like too low speed limits where the law itself was the real constraint to my freedom. Now the potential for overenthusiastic police to investigate any comment that might be deemed by anyone to be slightly offensive to anyone else means an oppression field exists around every keyboard. Orwell was right on all but dates.

It often seems that the official police are the least of our worries though. The real police are the social networks and the web. If you tweet something and it annoys some people, you will soon feel the wrath, even if it is a simple statement of fact or an innocent opinion. Even if it is entirely legal, if it falls into any of dozens of sensitive areas it might well jeopardize your next job, or the one after that, and it will likely stay there for ever. Or it might result in some busybody making a complaint to the police who do seem rather too politically correct and in spite of ‘the cuts’ seem to manage to find resources to police a wide range of things that were considered well outside the domain of the law until recently.

I’ve said it many times, but as people stopped believing in God, they didn’t stop being religious. Political correctness is simply one of the traits of 21st century piety. The very same people are politically correct today as were the holier-than-thou types looking down at everyone else in church a few decades ago. Now, the platform for gossip or petitions or many other means to undermine you is the net, but the potential audience is far bigger. The problem isn’t the religious nuts in a local church any more, it is a global church with multiple religions and a wide variety of religious nuts. If you tweet something, you may get retaliation from people anywhere in the world.

For me, the thought police are the biggest threat to liberty, and they threaten it globally. Government everywhere wants to close down any discussion that might cause tension between communities. Some even want to close down scientific debates such as on climate change. The UK, the USA, even Australia are all badly infected with the same libertyphobia, the same preference of oppression over liberty. Much of the media is highly complicit in wave after wave of censorship, even as they fight against other areas of censorship. Freedom of speech no longer exists, however much our leaders try to pretend they are protecting it.

Universities are following enthusiastically too. Several times recently speakers have been barred from universities because their message didn’t align with the political correctness there. It is shameful that institutions that sprung up to educate and debate and further knowledge are complicit in restricting and perverting it. It is even more worrying that it is often the student unions leading the closing down of freedom of speech. If you are only free to say one thing, you are not free at all.

Technology today is infinitely better than when I was a kid. In so many ways, the world is a far better place. On liberty, we have gone backwards.

I can draw only one conclusion: the future of liberty is a gilded cage.

 

 

The future of freedom of speech

This is mainly about the UK, but some applies elsewhere too.

The UK Police are in trouble yet again for taking the side of criminals against the law-abiding population. Our police seem to have frequent trouble with understanding the purpose of their existence. This time in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, some police forces decided that their top priority was not to protect freedom of speech nor to protect law-abiding people from terrorists, but instead to visit the newsagents that were selling Charlie Hebdo and get the names of people buying copies. Charlie Hebdo has become synonymous with the right to exercise freedom of speech, and by taking names of its buyers, those police forces have clearly decided that Charlie Hebdo readers are the problem, not the terrorists. Some readers might indeed present a threat, but so might anyone in the population. Until there is evidence to suspect a crime, or at the very least plotting of a crime, it is absolutely no rightful business of the police what anyone does. Taking names of buyers treats them as potential suspects for future hate crimes. It is all very ‘Minority Report’, mixed with more than a touch of ‘Nineteen-eighty-four’. It is highly disturbing.

The Chief Constable has since clarified to the forces that this was overstepping the mark, and one of the offending forces has since apologised. The others presumably still think they were in the right. I haven’t yet heard any mention of them saying they have deleted the names from their records.

This behavior is wrong but not surprising. The UK police often seem to have socio-political agendas that direct their priorities and practices in upholding the law, individually and institutionally.

Our politicians often pay lip service to freedom of speech while legislating for the opposite. Clamping down on press freedom and creation of thought crimes (aka hate crimes) have both used the excuse of relatively small abuses of freedom to justify taking away our traditional freedom of speech. The government reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre was not to ensure that freedom of speech is protected in the UK, but to increase surveillance powers and guard against any possible backlash. The police have also become notorious for checking social media in case anyone has said anything that could possibly be taken as offensive by anyone. Freedom of speech only remains in the UK provided you don’t say anything that anyone could claim to be offended by, unless you can claim to be a member of a preferred victim group, in which case it sometimes seems that you can do or say whatever you want. Some universities won’t even allow some topics to be discussed. Freedom of speech is under high downward pressure.

So where next? Privacy erosion is a related problem that becomes lethal to freedom when combined with a desire for increasing surveillance. Anyone commenting on social media already assumes that the police are copied in, but if government gets its way, that will be extended to list of the internet services or websites you visit, and anything you type into search. That isn’t the end though.

Our televisions and games consoles listen in to our conversation (to facilitate voice commands) and send some of the voice recording to the manufacturers. We should expect that many IoT devices will do so too. Some might send video, perhaps to facilitate gesture recognition, and the companies might keep that too. I don’t know whether they data mine any of it for potential advertising value or whether they are 100% benign and only use it to deliver the best possible service to the user. Your guess is as good as mine.

However, since the principle has already been demonstrated, we should expect that the police may one day force them to give up their accumulated data. They could run a smart search on the entire population to find any voice or video samples or photos that might indicate anything remotely suspicious, and could then use legislation to increase monitoring of the suspects. They could make an extensive suspicion database for the whole population, just in case it might be useful. Given that there is already strong pressure to classify a wide range of ordinary everyday relationship rows or financial quarrels as domestic abuse, this is a worrying prospect. The vast majority of the population have had arguments with a partner at some time, used a disparaging comment or called someone a name in the heat of the moment, said something in the privacy of their home that they would never dare say in public, used terminology that isn’t up to date or said something less than complimentary about someone on TV. All we need now to make the ‘Demolition Man’ automated fine printout a reality is more time and more of the same government and police attitudes as we are accustomed to.

The next generation of software for the TVs and games consoles could easily include monitoring of eye gaze direction, maybe some already do. It might need that for control (e.g look and blink), or to make games smarter or for other benign reasons. But when the future police get the records of everything you have watched, what image was showing on that particular part of the screen when you made that particular expression, or made that gesture or said that, then we will pretty much have the thought police. They could get a full statistical picture of your attitudes to a wide range of individuals, groups, practices, politics or policies, and a long list of ‘offences’ for anyone they don’t like this week. None of us are saints.

The technology is all entirely feasible in the near future. What will make it real or imaginary is the attitude of the authorities, the law of the land and especially the attitude of the police. Since we are seeing an increasing disconnect between the police and the intent behind the law of the land, I am not the only one that this will worry.

We’ve already lost much of our freedom of speech in the UK. If we do not protest loudly enough and defend what we have left, we will soon lose the rest, and then lose freedom of thought. Without the freedom to think what you want, you don’t have any freedom worth having.

 

After LGBT rights: Anonymity is the next battleground for gender identity

Lesbian, gay, bi, transsexual – the increasingly familiar acronym LGBT is also increasingly out of date. It contains a built-in fracture anyway. LGB is about sexual preference and T is about gender, altogether different things although people casually use them synonymously frequently, along with ‘sex’. An LGB or H(etero) person can also be transgender. Gender and sexuality are more complicated than they were and the large cracks in traditional labeling are getting wider. Some LGB people don’t like being lumped in the same rights war with T. There’s even a lesbian/gay separatist movement. Now in some regions and circles, a Q is added for queer/questioning. I was somewhat surprised when that happened because here in the UK, I think many would find the term ‘queer’ offensive and would prefer not to use it. ‘Questioning’ obviously is another dimension of variability so surely it should be QQ in any case?

But as they say, you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. We probably need a fresh start for additional words, not to just put lipstick on a pig (I’m an engineer, so I have a license to mix metaphors and to confuse metaphors with other literary constructions when I can’t remember the right term.)

More importantly, lots of people don’t want to be assigned a label and lots don’t want to be ‘outed’. They’re perfectly happy to feel how they do and appear to others how they do without being forced to come out of some imaginary closet to satisfy someone else’s agenda. LGBT people are not all identical, they have different personalities and face different personal battles, so there are tensions within and between gender groups as well as between individuals – tensions over nomenclature, tensions over who should be entitled to what protections, and who can still claim victim-hood, or who ‘represents’ their interests.

Now that important more or less equal rights have been won in most civilized countries, many people in these groups just want to enjoy their freedom, not to be told how to exist by LGBT pressure groups, which just replaces one set of oppression for another. As overall rights are leveled and wars are won, those whose egos and status were defined by that wars potentially lose identity and status so have to be louder and more aggressive to keep attention or move to other countries and cultures. So as equal rights battles close on one front, they open on another. The big battles over gay rights suddenly seem so yesterday. Activists are still fighting old battles that have already been won, while ignoring attacks from other directions.

The primary new battlefront of concern here is privacy and anonymity and it seems to be being ignored so far by LGBT groups, possibly because in some ways it runs against the ethos of forcing people to leave closets whether they want to or not. Without protection, there is a strong danger that in spite of many victories by LGBT campaigners, many people will start to suffer gender identity repression, oppression, identity and self-worth damage who are so far free from it. That would be sad.

While LGBT pressure groups have been fighting for gay and transsexual rights, technology has enabled new dimensions for gender. Even with social networking sites’ new gender options, these so far have not been absorbed into everyday vocabulary for most of us, yet are already inadequate. As people spend more and more of their lives in different roles in the many dimensions of social and virtual interactions, gender has taken on new dimensions that are so far undefended.

I don’t like using contrived terms like cybergender because they can only ever includes a few aspects of the new dimensions. Dimensions by normal definition are orthogonal, so you really need a group of words for each one and therefore many words altogether to fully describe your sexuality and gender identity, and why should you have to describe it anyway, why can’t you just enjoy life as best you can? You shouldn’t have to answer to gender busybodies. Furthermore, finding new names isn’t the point. Most of us won’t remember most of them anyway, and really names only appeal to those who want to keep gender warrior status because they can then fight for a named community. Shakespeare observed that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. It is the actuality of gender and mind and personality and individuality and personal existential experience that matters, not what we call it. It is gender/sexuality freedom itself that we now need to defend, no longer just LGBT rights, but I suspect some activists can’t tell the difference.

This new phase of gender flexibility creates issues that are far outside the domain of traditional gay rights – the opportunities and problems are different and the new ‘victims’ are often outside the traditional LGBT community. There is certainly a lot of scope for new psychology study but also possibility of new psychiatric issues. For most people though, gender identity fluidity in social networks or virtual worlds is a painless even a rewarding and enjoyable everyday experience, but that makes it no less important to defend. If we don’t defend it, it will be lost. Definitely.

Terms like cis and trans are used to identify whether someone is physically in their birth gender. I hated those terms in chemistry, I think they are equally annoying in gender discussion. They seem to have been created solely to add a pseudo-intellectual layer to ordinary everyday words to create an elite whose only extra skill is knowing the latest terminology. What is wrong with plain english? Look:

Cisgender: denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity conforms with the gender that corresponds to their biological sex; not transgender.

So, to those of us not out fighting a gender rights campaign: a man who feels male inside. Or a woman who feels a woman inside. I don’t actually find that very informative, with or without the pseudo-intellectual crap. It only tells me 10% of what matters.

Also check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender. Wikipedia is supposed by naive users to be up to date but these articles presumably kept up to date by activists appear to me to be about 20 years out of date based on a scan of topic titles – a long list of everyday gender experiences and identity is not covered. That is a big problem that is being obscured by excessive continuing focus on yesterday’s issues and determination to keep any others from sharing the same pedestals.

If a man feels male inside but wears a dress, we may traditionally call him a transvestite just so we have a convenient label, but how he actually feels gender-wise inside may be highly variable and not covered by overly simplistic static names. He might cross-dress for a short-lived sexual thrill, or simply to feel feminine and explore what he consider to be his feminine emotions, or for a stag party game, or as a full everyday lifestyle choice, or a security blanket, or a fashion statement, or political activism, or any number of other things. The essence of how it feels might vary from minute to minute. Internal feelings of identity can all vary as well as the cis and trans prefixes, and as well as sexual preference. But all the multi-dimensional variation seems to be thrown together in transsexuality, however inappropriate it might be. We might as well write LGBeverythingelse!

Let’s stop all the focus on names, and especially stop making changing lists of names and reassigning old-fashioned ones as offensive terms to maintain victim-hood. Let’s focus instead on pursuing true freedom of gender identity, expression, feeling, appearance, behavior, perception, on preserving true fluidity and dynamism, whether a permanent state or in gender play. Gender play freedom is important just as LGB freedom is important. Play makes us human, it is a major factor in making it worth being alive. Gender play often demands anonymity for some people. If a website enforces true identity, then someone cannot go there in their everyday business identity and also use it to explore their gender identity or for gender play. Even if it only insists on gender verification, that will exclude a lot of wannabe members from being how they want to be. If a man wants to pass himself off as a woman in the workplace, he is protected by law. Why can he not also have the same freedom on any website? He may only want to do it on Tuesday evenings, he won’t want that to govern all the rest of his online or everyday life identity.

In a computer game, social network site, virtual world, or in future interactions with various classes of AI and hybrids, gender is dynamic, it is fluid, it is asymmetric, it is asynchronous, it is virtual. It may be disconnected from normal everyday real life gender identity. Some gender play cannot exist without a virtual ‘closet’ because the relationship might depend totally on other people not knowing their identity, let alone their physical sex. The closet of network anonymity is being eroded very quickly though, and that’s why I think it is important that gender activists start focusing their attention on an important pillar of gender identity that has already been attacked and damaged severely, and is in imminent danger of collapsing.

Importance varies tremendously too. Let’s take a few examples in everyday 2015 life to expose some issues or varying importance.

If a woman is into playing a computer games, it is almost inevitable that she will have had no choice but to play as a male character sometimes, because some games only have a male player character. She may have zero interest in gender play and it is no more than a triviality to her to have to play a male character yet again, she just enjoys pulling the trigger and killing everything that moves like everyone else. Suppose she is then playing online. Her username will be exposed to the other players. The username could be her real name or a made-up string of characters. In the first case, her name gives away her female status so she might find it irritating that she now gets nuisance interactions from male players, and if so, she might have to create a new identity with a male-sounding name to avoid being pestered every time she goes online. That is an extremely common everyday experience for millions of women. If the system changes to enforce true identity, she won’t be able to do that and she will then have to deal with lots of nuisances pestering her and trying to chat her up. She might have to avoid using that game network, and thus loses out on all the fun she had. On the other side of the same network, a man might play a game that only has female playable character. With his identity exposed, he might be teased by his mates or family or colleagues for doing so so he also might avoid playing games that don’t use male characters for fear of teasing over his possible sexuality.

So we haven’t even considered anyone who wants to do any gender play yet, but already see gender-related problems resulting from loss of privacy and anonymity.

Let’s move on. Another man might enjoy playing female characters and deliberately pick a female playable character when it is an option. That does not make it a transsexual issue yet. Many men play female characters if the outfits look good. On Mass Effect for example, many men play as ‘Femshep’ (a female ship captain, called Shepard) because ‘if you’re going to spend 35 hours or more looking at someone’s ass, it might as well be a cute one’. That justification seems perfectly believable and is the most trivial example of actual gender play. It has no consequence outside of the game. The conversation and interactions in the game are also affected by the character gender, not just the ass in question, so it is slightly immersive and it is a trivially deliberate choice, not enforced by the game so it does qualify as gender play nonetheless. Again, if identity is broadcast along with gender choice, some teasing might result – hardly comparable to the problems which many LGBT people have suffered, but on the other hand, still a small problem that is unnecessary and easily avoidable.

A third man might make exactly the same decision because he enjoys feeling he is female. He is in a totally fantasy environment with fantasy characters, but he extracts a feeling of perceived femininity from playing Femshep. That is the next level of gender play – using it to experience, however slightly, the feeling of being a woman, even if it is just a perception from a male point of view of how a woman might feel.

A fourth might go up another level by taking that online, and choose a female-sounding name so that other players might assume he is a woman. Most wouldn’t make that assumption since gender hopping in social environments is already widespread, but some users take people at face value so it would have some effect, some reward. He could experience other actual people interacting with him as if he was a woman. He might like it and do it regularly. His gender play might never go any further than that. He might still be otherwise 100% male and heterosexual and not harbor any inner thoughts of being a woman, cross-dressing or anything. No lives are changed, but losing anonymity would prevent a lot of such men from doing this. Should they be allowed to? Yes of course would be my answer. Real identity disclosure prevents it if they would be embarrassed if they were found out.

But others might go further. From experiencing real interactions, some men might get very used to being accepted as a woman in virtual environments (ditto for women, though women posing as men is allegedly less common than men posing as women). They may make the same decisions with other networks, other social sites, other shared virtual worlds. They might spend a large part of their free time projecting their perception of a feminine personality, and it might be convincing to others. At this level, rights start to clash.

We might think that a man wanting to be accepted as a woman in such an environment should be able to use a female name and avatar and try to project himself as female. He could in theory do so as a transvestite in real life without fear of legal discrimination, but then he might find it impossible to hide from friends and family and colleagues and might feel ashamed or embarrassed so might not want to go down that road.

Meeting other people inevitably cause friendships and romantic relationships. If a man in a virtual world presents as a woman and someone accepts him as a woman and they become romantically involved, the second person might be emotionally distressed if he later discovers he has been having a relationship with another man. Of course, he might not care, in which case no harm is done. Sometimes two men might each think they are with a woman, both of them acting out a lesbian fling in a virtual world. We start to see where forced identity diclosure would solve some problems, and create others. Should full real identity be enforced? Or just real gender? Or neither? Should it simply be ‘buyer beware’?

Even with this conflict of rights, I believe we should side with privacy and anonymity. Without it, a lot of this experimentation is blocked, because of the danger of embarrassment or shame given the personal situations of the parties involved. This kind of gender play via games or online socializing or virtual worlds is very common. A lot of men and women are able to explore and enjoy aspects of their personality, gender and sexuality that they otherwise couldn’t. A lot of people have low social skills that make it hard to interact face to face. Others are not sufficiently physically attractive to find it easy to get real dates. They are no less valuable or important than anyone else. Who has the right to say they shouldn’t be able to use a virtual world or social network site to find dates that would otherwise be out of their league, or interact via typing in ways they could never do in real-time speech?

I don’t have any figures. I have looked for them, but can’t find them. That to me says this whole field needs proper study. But my own experience in early chat rooms in the late 1990s says that a lot of people do gender-hopping online who would never dare in real life. And that was even before we had visual avatars or online worlds like second life or sex sites. Lots of perfectly normal people with perfectly normal lives and even perfectly normal sex lives still gender hop secretly.

Back to names. What if someone is talking as one gender on the phone at the same time as interacting as another gender in a virtual world? Their virtual gender might change frequently too. They may enjoy hopping between male and female in that virtual world, they may even enjoy being ‘forced’ to. People can vary their gender from second to second, it might depend on any aspect of location, time or context, they can run mutliple genders and sexualities in parallel at the same time in different domains or even in the same domain. Gender has already become very multidimensional, and it will become increasingly so as we progress further into this century. Take the gender-hopping activity in virtual worlds and then add direct nervous system links, shared experience, shared bodies, robot avatars, direct brain links, remote control, electronic personality mods, the ability to swap bodies or to switch people’s consciousness on and off. And then keep going, the technology will never stop developing.

Bisexual, tri-sexual, try-sexual, die-sexual, lie-sexual, why-sexual, my-sexual, even pie-sexual, the list of potential variations of gender identity and sexual practices and preferences is expanding fast towards infinity. Some people are happy to do things in the real world in full exposure. Others can only do so behind a wall of privacy and anonymity for any number of reasons. We should protect their right to do so, because the joy and fulfillment and identity they may get from their gender play is no less important than anyone else’s.

LGBT rights activism is just so yesterday! Let’s protect the new front line where anonymity, freedom of identity, and privacy are all being attacked daily. Only then can we keep gender freedom and gender identity freedom.

Meanwhile, the activists we need are still fighting at the back.