A few words on gender-neutral pen names

s.e. smith wrote a great piece on how we gender people online even when the byline tends to the ambiguous. There are a lot of good points here. I'll highlight a few and add some of my own experiences:

"For the bulk of my career, long before I started discussing my gender, I was assigned female. Like Nico , that was, I suspect, because of the sorts of things I wrote about. I covered women’s and gender issues and other social justice topics. I talked about sexuality, about disability politics, about pop culture, and was relentlessly read as a woman even though I hadn’t given a whisper of my gender, nor did any pictures of me exist online."

A little background: Until recently, when I started this blog, I used initials online (or something relatively free of gender markers, like a song title or literary reference). Mostly this was because I'm too lazy to come up with a clever user name. Long before social networking became common, I was on a lot of forums and Usenet-type things, and because male was the standard, I was presumed male. (I was usually of unaware of this until someone called me "dude" or "man.") I think this is the primary reason why I escaped a lot of gendered bullying and harassment online. I'm not saying everyone should use gender-free name online (and this isn't the reason why I prefer them), but it is important to note. A few years ago, another commenter on a feminist blog gently implied that I was being deceitful, which gnawed at me for a little while, but to be honest, it feels more deceitful to me that I use my unambiguous first name in feminist spaces, at least in some small part, because I don't want someone mistaking me for some cis het dude new to feminism.

(For what it's worth, I'm called Kat as well as Kathy in the real world. Kat used to sound vaguely androgynous to me, but now I don't know a single Kat or Cat who isn't female.)

"Intriguingly, those ridiculous little tests you can use to test the alleged gender of a writer from a sample of that person’s work almost always turn up male for me."

I'll admit, I'm a little obsessed with these things. (The gender genie is the one I've used). My blog posts usually gender me as male, but my fiction is invariably female according to the algorithm. If you scroll down, it actually shows you the words you've used that triggered a male or female result.  And s.e. is right: these things probably shouldn't be taken too seriously, but it's more fodder for discussion, I guess.

"And, I think, the use of a gender-neutral names also adds to why people think of me as female. There’s a certain expectation that women hide themselves as writers, and thus that people writing under initials or under ambiguous names are probably women."

I honestly never though about it that way, since most of my inchoate internet experiences were through fan forums where most people had some sort of un-gendered name. I never felt I was hiding by writing under initials. If anything, it was freeing.