One of the great appeals of
YearlyKos is the chance to finally put faces to names - attaching a real identity to an imagined persona. We all have images in our minds of fellow Kossacks. The only way to rationalise those images to reality is to meet up, and that is what YearlyKos will mean to me.
I'm coming out as a real person at YearlyKos after a couple years of just being LondonYank here on DailyKos. I've had fun hiding behind my LondonYank persona - and laughing at how I'm viewed out here in the blogosphere by fellow Kossacks and even some pissed off LGF types who've take offense at some of my diaries.
Since I have to abandon my anonymity in June at YearlyKos anyway, I'm letting you all in on my secret identity here at DailyKos right now . . .
For a peep at the real LondonYank, follow me below the fold. I am not who you thought I was!
Yup. That's right. I'm a petite blonde chick.
Stringing all of my comments together you would already know a lot about me, but you probably thought I was a bloke.
I don't know how or who first started casting LondonYank as a bloke, but I liked it. I think it may have been Soonergrunt explaining one of my comments in response to someone else referencing LondonYank as "he".
While never overtly dishonest or misleading, I took to writing more of my comments and diaries as if I were a bloke inside my head. I would refer to my "partner" instead of my boyfriend, and my "spouse" instead of my husband. I'd structure my sentences so that there was never any need to reference my gender.
It helped that I've been to Iraq and work in international banking and write a bit about the intelligence community. All these topics are widely associated with blokes rather than chicks. Soonergrunt assumed I was a guy because we share so much of the same realist perspective on the war. Bonddad and Jerome a Paris just assumed I was a bloke like them because the financial markets are still mostly male.
The issue came to a head when Bonddad invited me to join the YearlyKos economics panel. That meant coming out in the open and revealing myself once and for all. And possibly getting on all kinds of blacklists for some of the anti-Bushista rants I've written. It was a scary decision to make, but I'm proud of myself for coming out. If there is going to be a blacklist for pro-Constitution, anti-war patriots, then I guess I want my name on it - and not just as LondonYank.
So what else to tell you? If you were to go back over all my diaries and comments you'd already know a lot about me:
* I've got two wonderful boys
* I went to University of Michigan
* I lived in the Middle East as a kid, but mostly grew up in Michigan
* I was a central banker at the New York Fed in the 1980s
* I was a securities markets regulator in London in the 1990s
* I contributed to reconstruction of the Iraqi banking sector after the war in 2003
* I worked in Dubai last year on the new Dubai International Financial Centre
* I've got a narrowboat in London for fun now and lived on a boat in Manhattan
* I've lived in the United Kingdom for 16 years and took out British citizenship last year
* I like doner kebabs with extra chilli and speak a little Arabic.
Want to know more? Well, you'll just have to come to YearlyKos and buy me a beer.