Coming Out / finding a label

[leora]

I found a label that seems to fit me a whole lot better than the previous ones I have had. I don't think my gender is female. I think agender fits much, much better. I just didn't realize it was an option. I've never liked being identified as female... actually, female is okay, but I really dislike being identified as a girl, lady, woman, gal,

Comments

[leora]

On LJ. when people don't know someone's sex, the default assumption tends to be female. But I used to hang out on IRC, and I was an IRC operator and a CSop (don't worry too much about what those terms means, but it meant that I had a lot of authority for both helping users, dealing with abuse, and generally fixing problems). And on IRC, the default assumption was very heavily weighted toward assuming people were male. So, people would sometimes seek me out simply because I was flagged as an oper (there is an easy way to search for opers, plus I hung out in help channels to be findable), but they didn't know me. Sometimes they would assume I was male. Especially since I learned early into my IRCing that it was useful to have a gender-neutral nickname. Having a female nickname made it too likely I'd get hit on, and sometimes as an IRC oper I had to sit in a channel to sort of babysit it when it was having problems. The channel could be any sort of channel allowed on the network that was having problems. This meant sometimes sitting in BDSM channels (they were one of the categories that were at high risk of being trolled other channels were channels about religion/atheism and channels dedicated to bigotry since we allowed them as legal free speech so we had things like KKK channels, and unsurprisingly they got trolled a fair bit, oh and channels for homosexuality were also I think common targets), which is how I learned I wanted a gender-neutral nick that started with a capital letter.

Anyhow, having one meant that people often assumed I was male, which was fine. And I remember once even being thanked for helping by someone who called me Mr. $my_nick_at_the_time, which I thought was sweet. I never saw any reason to correct people over it, and being more gender-ambiguous was useful. Although there were a fair number of other female opers. Most of them did use gender-neutral nicks though.