Indeed, we can only speculate.  I decline to say my own theories, for I have no wish to sow rumours.  In private, she refused to tell me why.


It is a mundane theory, boring, unlikely to excite the imagination—and maybe wise and insightful.  I hope it is the case.  In the past, she said some things to me which would seem consistent with that (and she repeatedly urged me to leave the forum myself), but her final post seemed to imply otherwise.  Who knows.


That is fair of you.  Many people who got the red cat-scratch only bear a grudge about it, regardless of how much it was deserved.  I see that she neutralized yours in May 2020, about five months before she left.


Now, that is an interesting subject of speculation!  There has been endless talk about it; sometimes, there have even been whole threads devoted to that question.  It is probably the most productive use that the Reputation board has ever had.

She (he? whatever) caused this confusion for privacy, not for jollies.  She once pointed out to me that male/female is a significant bit of personally identifying information.  He was a privacy fanatic.  Concealing that one bit of information theoretically doubled her anonymity set—although the effect in practice would be disproportionate, given the disproportionate distribution between males and females in these types of venues.  Partitioning and intersection attacks to attempt deanonymizing the cat cannot exclude known males, and cannot exclude known females.

It is not unprecedented to incite such confusion for unusual reasons.  For instance, I know of a psychiatrist-blogger who subtly switched back and forth between apparently-male and apparently-female, without ever explicitly claiming either.  He did this to make his readers’ assumptions a part of whatever message he was presenting—and sometimes, to show them how wrong their assumptions can be.  As a professional psychiatrist, he pulled this off most excellently.  But he was not a privacy expert; in his case, he was eventually doxed as a man.

Earlier in this thread, I quoted a post in which Lauda presented a female image and spoke of her “husband”, in a context where I think that she was probably joking; see also my take on it.  Other forum members have dug up posts where Lauda seemed to indicate or imply being a man.  I think it’s likely that the apparent contradictions were not unintentional.

Some longtime forum regulars are almost sure that he was a man.  I think that she was probably a woman.  I pestered her endlessly about this question; all that she would tell me was, “I’m a cat.”  Flip a coin, pick a pronoun, and stick to it.  Whatever the correct guess may have been, she/he was never offended by wrong guesses.

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