this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation
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My own username explicitly alludes to my gender and I still get called a man about half the time. I don't really care or anything, but I think it's funny
Wait, you are a woman? Just kidding. I noticed that many people, myself often included, often don't read that carefully, or don't pay that much attention to the usernames. It wouldn't be the first time i'm typing a reply, say, to answer a question and only then notice that the person already added something in their text, like: i already tried this, and my reply is useless and i delete the draft.
I also don't really care that much that people assume my gender, but whether you read carefully or not; why assume everyone here is male. I see a lot of guys commenting that there are not many women on lemmy; well duh, if you assume everyone is male... I always try to reply to people without assuming gender, but apparently, for some people that is hard.
Yeah, I mean you're absolutely right. There is a male default assumption we tend to have. Maybe it's a quirk of language, but I think it's certainly more cultural. Our preconceived notions of "person in internet" is masculine, even though women use the internet just as much and make up half the population. The only time it's not the case is when you're in places that are exclusively for women, or in places where the hobby is so dominantly feminine
For simple shit like this, I don't think it's particularly harmful or malicious. We invent a person we're talking to online, and the more often invented person is a man. It's more a symptom of the greater culture at large, and effectively just a part of our language. We have "they" but I think there's also a gender-neutral "he" that we just don't recognize that arose from the male-as-default idea. Intentionally misgendering, on the other hand, is 100% a shitty thing to do, but that's an argument on a different topic anyway