No, I don't consciously think about hiding my gender online (but I am careful about personal facts). As you can see, my online moniker is not necessarily male or female.

this is because I don't consciously have to tell everyone all the time that everything about me is a woman. I don't have to shove it in your face all the time and I don't see it as the end-all be-all defining factor of who I am and what's important to me!!!

But I also don't hang out in chat rooms. Not due to any fear or anything--I just have no reason to do so.

BTW, I'm female.

not with men, what's the point there are plenty of gay/bi men but with "bi-curious" women. Of course invariably you have two men pretending to be women to each other.

On most internet sites I frequent, I have a gender-neutral user name (I am a woman). On occasion, when a comment necessarily reveals my gender (something I neither hide nor go out of my way to emphasize), quite often someone replies with a comment saying they had assumed I was a man (presumably based on previous comments in the same thread, or my writings elsewhere on the blog).

I am always surprised to read this, and am intensely, intensely curious what it is about my writing style or comment content that makes people assume that. I also find it curious that when my gender is revealed only in the most tangental way, such as the use of "my husband" in a comment of several paragraphs of substantive thoughts, that so often people respond not to what I had to say, but respond simply to express their shock that I am a woman. What about my gender is not only momentarily "eh, who'dve thunk" interesting, but so remarkable that they bother going completely off topic in order to comment on it?

Strange, very strange. I am very interested in reading others' experiences, and hope that more research is done on this topic.

I belong to a major forum online where the running joke is that "there are no girls on the internet!", so even if you are "out" as a girl, everyone just assumes you are a guy.

Also, there is the cam-whore stigma as well, so if you are out as a girl, you are obviously just doing it for attention. The one time I did have a famle type name, I was harassed constantly by guys wanting to cyber. I have been harassed a lot less since having a nuetral name.

I don't frequent chatrooms but I am active on many boards. On sites such as Yahoo, where the commentary is unfiltered and often brutal, my profile lists me as male and my handle is not gender specific but most assume it is a male. On sites with registered, monitored forums for specific interests, I usually have a neutral handle but sign my posts with my real first name, because conversation as a rule is friendly and I have made many webfriends on these kind of sites. On Salon I use a consistent handle and am not really interested in obscuring my gender. I have just choosen to use my real first inital and real last name rather then my complete first and last name because I don't want anyone to be able to search my name and make assumptions about me based upon my poltical views. The funniest thing I experienced though was on a Broadsheet comment thread a few months ago. I stated in my post that I was a woman and then went on to state an oppinion that other women insisted could only be held by a man. When I insisted that I was indeed a women, several posters congradulated me for my ability to sprout feminist statements but they KNEW I was a man because they simply refused to believe a women could hold an oppinion contrary to theirs!

I use my real name on everything, and since it ends in an -a, most people probably guess I'm a woman if I don't publicly say so.

But *I* don't go into chat. Who the hell needs it? It's like the worst of being in a public room full of strangers *and* relying solely on written cues to communicate, put together.

I've never been harassed for my gender online. Perhaps if people are so obnoxious to women in chat, the solution is to find more congenial places to go on the Net and avoid public chat rooms. I'd rather not go where I'll be harassed than wear a virtual burqa or go in drag.

I dabbled in the more adult nature of the internet when I first came to the web. I'd been a denizen of local bulletin boards where everyone pretty much knew everyone so safety wasn't that big a deal. The world wide web was a much more open forum so I used a pretty anonymous handle, but made my gender obvious. Silly me, I used my first name (even though it's common). Between flirting, cyber, occasional phone sex, and forays into erotica/porn (call it what you will) there were some scary folk out there. Truly scary.

Of course to some I would always be (no matter what) a male posing as a woman. It lost its appeal somewhere along the way. If I had it to do over would I pick a more gender neutral name - possibly. I'm not sure in a less 'adult' forum it really matters. I post in a couple of different places, although not many. Sometimes I use the nick I'm using now and sometimes I just use my first name.

I pick variations of characters in books or movies that I like. I don't go to chat rooms or use IM, just message boards because I have no desire to be part of an online community or make friends like with MySpace.

But I will say that when I use a gender neutral name, about half of the people will assume I'm a guy. I don't care, never really thought about it. When I'm talking about a TV show or books I don't really care whether people know I'm male or female.