Being Gendered Correctly

[Kimmy_Dee]

Actually not to nitpick, but historically within the English Language the Masculine Pronouns have actually been considered the Gender Neutral Pronouns as well. That is because English does not have an individual set of Gender Neutral Singular Pronouns the way most other languages do.

Incorrect. Historically they was the gender neutral singular. Defaulting to male was a much more recent change to language (very late nineteenth century).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singula...pected_authors Just as an example.

Tho language is not immutable.

Depressed how many people want me to just accept it. "Come have a happy fantasy experience, but in exchange accept constant misgendering without complaint."

Oh, and just FYI. Transgender doesn't mean "woman in a man's body" or "I was a man and became a woman". I do not appreciate being described as such.

[Grifstar]

I always call people by people by their character's gender unless they state otherwise or I know them personally. That way even if I am wrong it's still at least somewhat correct going by an avatar perceptive. As mentioned above there is plenty of other ways to assume (in my case it's female characters wearing only coliseum that I assume are always male), but there's still never really knowing.

But yeah, girl gamer too. I've been called a guy plenty of times. It's never really bothered me that much, although at the same time it does get a little annoying and/or depressing that that's usually the first idea that comes up (unless I am playing one of my guy alts at the time, then whatever). Correcting is kinda a little pointless too when odds are I'm never ever going to run into the same people on DF again.

[Fensfield]

People calling female characters 'he' gets up my nose and all -.-

And stuff the assumed fact that the likelihood is the player on the other side of the character's a boy. Calling them 'he' is still rude and stupid. The entity you're interacting with has chosen to appear female. Unless they start doing things invoke the real world that's all should matter and making assumptions on their player's 'real' gender is in a similar vein declaring, "Hey! Hey guess what! It's not real." at random, regular intervals.

It's even worse when people do it on the forums, seeing as here you don't even have the excuse of being unable to review and/or edit your message for reflex errors. .. Although reflexively addressing what appears to be female as male is already pretty weird, in my book >.>

[Keikun]

I would say 90% of the female chars on ANY online game are actually guys, there's a thread about why we choose female over male chars btw.
Also, whats the problem? Im a guy and whenever they call me a she in a party im like whatever, there's no need to "hey wait a sec, im a guy!" I dont see any problem here unless you want free items.

[Massterchef]

People can find anything to complain about.

[Gilraen]

Depressed how many people want me to just accept it. "Come have a happy fantasy experience, but in exchange accept constant misgendering without complaint."

It's not that you should accept it, it's that it's inconsequential to enjoying the game. Alot of the time when I get identified thusly the other player doesn't even see me, they're talking through /t or /fc, so they can't even see what gender I am. And in Duty Finder it's really not worth the effort of correcting because, really, I'm beyond caring about it. It's just a game, I don't know nor will likely ever know any of these people in real life. And if I do ever meet said people it will be a nice little icebreaker to get a conversation going to be all, "Yeah, nice to meet you, I'm X on Y server. Yeah, really." It's only when the game gets real that I ever care. Guess you could call it indifference but it's helped me keep sane in playing MMOs for as long as I have.

[Kimmy_Dee]

It's inconsequential to enjoying the game for you. It is not for me. People assuming I'm a guy is something I already have to worry about in the real world, I don't need it in the video game as well, and every time I get called 'he' despite all my attempts to present as female without drawing attention to myself, it's a reminder of all the fear and bullshit I have to deal with in the real world. I dunno about you, but being constantly reminded of shitty real world stuff does not make for an enjoyable gaming experience for me.

[Spot]

Your feelings are your responsibility. Not the entirety of the gaming community.

[Rennah]

This is a subject I've gotten into many, many times with friends, and I'm not going to get too deep into the discussion (though I already expressed my opinion back on the first page), but I will say this...

Don't you think it's just a little unfair to say "It doesn't matter" when you're not the affected party, and aren't a part of the group that it most often happens to? Or "It doesn't bother me, so it doesn't matter"...because no one else has a valid opinion, of course.

[Fensfield]

It's inconsequential to enjoying the game for you. It is not for me. ... I dunno about you, but being constantly reminded of shitty real world stuff does not make for an enjoyable gaming experience for me.

Aaand exactly.

I'm not sure at what point it happened but somewhere along the line people seem to have just forgotten that it's fundamentally rude to rub the real world in people's online experience's without permission (however good or bad 'RL' may be) - at the very least in any format that includes the term Role-Playing.

I don't care if you (obviously not addressing Kimmy) find these things inconsequential, it's fairly near empirical that invoking the real world without permission compromises the worth of the experience for other people. In some cases a little, in some cases a lot, but either way it's certainly not contributing anything positive. Assuming that it doesn't or simply not caring is, in my opinion, unarguably rude, and I think everyone would be enjoying matters a lot more if the prevailing atmosphere were that you don't do things to compromise the potential depth of the experience for other people, even if you don't yourself care to 'get into it'.

I mean for me, personally? It's about equivalent to going to a reading or lecture only to have the jerk in the next seat yawn theatrically at every other pronoun.