Reply #48: Some of the respondents in this thread, while proclaiming it's no big deal, [View All]

[BurtWorm]

then procede to miss the point or make another one entirely from the one I am making, in effect making a big deal of it. Digby's writing is *not* what made me think she was a male. Maybe I should phrase that another way to reinforce it: I did *not* assume Digby was a male because of her writing. I did not pick up any gender cues from it at all. I assumed she was a "he" because other bloggers, when writing about her, referred to her as a "he."

Now can you seriously tell me, with a straight face, that if you make a mistake about the gender of someone (not just in the moment, but over time) and are corrected, your discovery has no more impact on you than if you had mistaken her brown eyes for blue ones? Is gender, in other words, no more of a frame for how we perceive someone or even ourselves than the length of one's finger nails, for example, or the shape of one's nose?