Stealth / Closeted

Autumn Sandeen recently wrote an article about Mike Penner / Christine Daniels called "The Closet Kills" for PHB. A woman who transitioned quite a long time ago responded to it, and her take on Sandeen's ideas about stealth seemed like exactly the kind of opinion we don't often hear in the larger / activist trans communities. So here it is:
Sandeen writes:

So first of all, there is a difference in trans community in living closeted and living stealth.

Then a couple of paragraphs further down, confuses stealth and closeted:

However, I didn't chose (sic) stealth; I instead chose (sic) to live out of the closet.

This is such a common misconception. It drives me nuts. This stealth = closeted thing.

Here's how I see it. In order to be happy and harmonious and generally get on well in life, you've gotta present to the world at large as how you identify. When I was assigned male and self identified as female, I was fucking miserable.

So then I transitioned, and started presenting as transsexual. I was still fucking miserable, because people still didn't see me as the gender that I saw myself, which is female. For the most part, they still gendered me as male, doing some sort of "act". Often they were really complimentary about my act. "Oh, I would never have known!" (that you were really a bloke). Not terribly helpful.

So then I stopped telling people about my trans past, and allowed them to gender me correctly. Guess what? My identity and presentation are aligned. I'm a happy camper. No act.

So this Autumn Sandeen clearly identifies as trans. She gets to to the point where her self identification and presentation match, and she's happy as an out (in all capitals, apparently) trans woman. Good for her. Only there's a hitch. It appears she identifies all trans women as being just like her, and is somehow disappointed/distressed/off her weetbix because some of us are "living in a closet".

Apparently my life can't ever be fulfilling, because I'm not disclosing.

Now here's how I see stealth and closet.

Closeted is where you hide some aspect of yourself. Something you do. Whether that's fucking with other men or dressing up as a woman on weekends.

Stealth is where you fail to disclose an irrelevant past that would cause people to gender you incorrectly. There's no ambiguity, because you present how you identify.

Totally, totally different things. If you're living stealthily because you identify as female, despite being assigned male as a kid, then you're certainly not living in a closet. You're showing people what you actually are, not what somebody arbitrarily assigned you once.

I have no idea what set Penner/Daniels off. It could be that he was a CDer who got caught up in the pink mist and ended up transitioning and regretting it. It could be that she ID'd as female, but made the mistake of a very public transition, so found that she was never able to reach escape velocity and actually be seen as female. Either way it was a fucking tragedy. Either way he/she was in torment. Obviously.