Outing

Outing means the revelation of a fact about a person (usually a fact about their personal life) that that person had not publicly discussed. The canonical example is publicly revealing someone's homosexuality. It is frequently used in geek circles to describe identifying someone by their legal name (or a name recognisable to family and friends) who prefers to be anonymous or pseudonymous online.

Outing is occasionally defended as necessary to avoid hypocrisy on the part of public figures (for example, a queer politician who denounces rights for queer people). More controversially, it is also defended as a way to reveal the "true size" of a particular group of people, by revealing how common it is to be secretly a member of the group.

Outing is however also often extremely damaging, exposing the outed person to career difficulties, personal conflicts, or violence.

Examples

Blogging

• In April 2009, the legal name of the blogger using the 'soft' pseudonym "hilzoy" (her legal name was well known by readers) at the blog Obsidian Wings was revealed, apparently unintentionally, by journalist Linda Hirshman in Slate magazine. Slate refused to edit the article after publication, and the article has been, for example, used to link hilzoy's legal name to her blog on Wikipedia [1]
• The real name of the blogger using the stronger pseudonym of "publius" at Obsidian Wings was revealed intentionally by journalist Ed Whelan of the National Review
• The exposing of police blogger "NightJack" by British newspaper The Times.at the blog Obsidian Wings