In a comment to my post about the practical problems of constitutional issues, Veeshir stressed the importance of anonymity,

We've come full circle back to when it was best for your gov't to not know your name.

Our only defense is anonymity.

This is just as true of anonymous bloggers as it is of anonymous commenters. I don't care how long someone has been blogging, how articulate or how many readers he or she has, none of that invests an anonymous blogger with the kind of personal credibility that comes from independent verifiability. The only checks and balances on anonymous bloggers is when they are unmasked, as a man calling himself "Libertarian Girl" discovered:

One thing I learned from this blog is how easy attractive woman have it. When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl. Every day I'd check Technorati and discover new unsolicited links. It was like I had warped into an alternate universe where all the rules had changed. At the rate things were happening, this would have been an A-list blog in a few more months.

It's funny how there have been some posts in the blogosphere saying that the political blogosphere was a boys club that discriminated against women, as evidenced by how few politics bloggers were women. Boy were they completely off the mark. It's ten times easier for a woman's blog to become popular.

what I'm wondering right now is why I can't be a pre-post-operative female-to-male transsexual trapped in the body of a man, but who, because of pure luck, has no need to go through with the surgery, because I already have male anatomical features (i.e., a woman who wants to become a man but who is by accident of birth already trapped in the body of a man). It would be a terrible hardship (a cruel travesty, even) to make me surgically become a man trapped in the body of a woman who wants to become a man because the man is trapped in her body, if I can shortcircuit the entire process and merely accept the fact that I am already where I would be after surgery back and forth.

Anyway, the fact that there's no way to verify whether an anonymous woman is actually a man highlights a serious problem which arises when anonymous bloggers make factual claims based on unverifiable life experiences, or offer opinions based on their personal claims of expertise or superiority.

There's that old rule that when something looks too good to be true, it usually is. I think that applies in spades to anonymous bloggers who say what people want to hear.