I had a rather horrific experience this past weekend that, unfortunately, demonstrates all too clearly the perils of having too much information out there in public on the internet. I went over to my Dad's for dinner to celebrate my birthday yesterday and during the course of the time that I was there he pulled me into his bedroom privately and showed me printed copies of a review of a crossdressing book (Out & about:The Emancipated Crossdresser) that I had posted on Amazon.com as well as a copy of my Yahoo! profile which, at one time, mentioned my crossdressing (Yes, I had realized later on that that was not such a good idea so I edited it out but apparently not soon enough). The scariest thing about the whole experience was that my Dad knew NOTHING about my crossdressing nor did I ever plan on telling him and I was shocked into disbelief at what what was happening. Fortunately, he was amazingly supportive of me and said that he still loved me and didn't care what I did privately. However, he strongly urged me to pull all such information that I had out there on the internet regarding my crossdressing where it was associated with my real name because he said he was afraid of it potentially coming back and hurting my chances for advancement in my field. Despite asking him point-blank, he emphatically refused to tell me who gave him the information and, as such, I pretty much have let the matter drop (I suspect it was probably a family member) but I am really freaked out about the experience and feel like I can't totally relax knowing that somebody somewhere out there took the time to look me up on the internet like that. My Dad seemed to think that somebody (whoever it was who found the information and showed it to him) might have got me mixed up with my Dad because our names are the same, although my profile clearly indicates that I am 30, which is NOWHERE near my Dad's age. I've since gone in and "scrubbed" or eliminated any online mentions of my crossdressing wherever my real name is listed. I posted the information online before, I guess, because I wanted to be more open about it but I never thought that the information would end up in my Dad's hands. But if it can end up in my Dad's hands like that, then it is not too difficult to imagine it ending up in ANYBODY's hands. I do have a pretty tolerant family, my supervisor and co-workers are a pretty tolerant group of people, and our governor (as much as I dislike him) did take the pretty gutsy step of signing an executive order prohibiting employment within state government on the basis of gender or sexual identity, so I don't feel particularly threatened (especially since I'm NOT running for public office or in the "spotlight"). However, if this experience has taught me anything it is that, unless you consciously intend to "out" yourself to everybody, it may be wiser to stick to your "psuedonyms" and use other means of anynomity when discussing your crossdressing because apparently there are people out there who may, intentionally or unintentionally, stumble across and share information that you just may not want to be shared with certain people.