Originally Posted by
Teia
Eh, it's not a simple case of being feeble minded so much as it is social conditioning to see male and female as two immutable, non-overlapping categories. The game world follows many of the same aspects of social interaction that the real one does, and the player character presents an online identity just as much as their real-life presentation reflects a real-life identity. So when people get used to, say, someone playing as a male hume and suddenly that player switches to a female hume (i.e. leaving a race change totally out of it), it's given a similar reaction people have in the real world to that sort of thing happening. Usually this is just uneasiness and aversion, but, very unfortunately, sometimes the reaction involves an element of hostility (verbal or otherwise). This is, actually, very likely the reason why I've seen a sentiment in this thread that a race change would make more sense or whatever than a gender change: There's nothing in real life to use as a heuristic to evaluate an online reaction to a race change, but there is for a gender change.
Now, I could say all kinds of choice words about how that's an unfortunate mindset and how I wish society would let go of cissexism and oppositional sexism, you can't really say someone's "feeble minded" if they've had those things indoctrinated into them by society from a young age and have a bit of trouble when they find these notions being challenged—in all likelihood, they've never had a reason to examine these beliefs in the context of someone who breaks their expectations. The feeble mindedness is when someone refuses to update their world view. I can tell you from experience that most people do actually get over their uneasiness towards gender fluidity after a bit of time adjusting to the concept.