The difference is that if you chose to have a male nickname, or if you otherwise decided to advertise your masculinity (bragging about your genitalia, talking about your wife, even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer), there would be no repercussions.

Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a job, she would be known as female and harassed.

Every single woman had to think about that, every single day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't.

Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes. No, you may not hit on every single person on the Internet just because you think they are female." They object, but to women, that's something they've done every single day of their online lives.

I’ve condensed and repeated the anecdotes of others, which have been shared with me in this thread, and what I say now has no reflection on that.

But:

> bragging about your genitalia,

If you’re not doing this ironically, then what the fuck communities are you in?

> talking about your wife

Women can have wives, but sure, this is more valid than the other examples. People do talk about spouses/partners.

> even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer

Women -definitely- can like these things. Seems awfully sexist of you to assume not.

> Women -definitely- can like these things

Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if they don't, or if they like other things, speaking up about those things isn't equally easy.

Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap point with an offhand accusation.

It's totally a thing. I see comments all the time on various sites where people use "he" by default to refer to previous commenters in a discussion thread even when they're known only by nickname.

Sure, but "he" is a default pronoun in English.

That's not really true is it? There are alternatives like "they", which has been perfectly good usage for longer than people think. It's not like Spanish, where a group of people are "chicas" if they're all women, "chicos" if they're all men and "chicos" again if they're a mixture of men and women.

> In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender-neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until around the 1960s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender

(Wikipedia sources https://web.archive.org/web/20120530024829/http://www.nytime...)

Of course:

> More recently, this use of he has become less accepted, and singular they is becoming the dominant form

But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody flips a switch and everyone across the world updates their habits, so it takes time.

While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he or she" being the taught solution for a single person of unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is going out of favour.

In the 18th century do you think most women went to school or ever had a job outside the home? Easy assumption to make that anyone reading a textbook was a "he" lol

The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet. I don't think it was even a major contender for the English language gender-neutral singular pronoun before then.

That isn't at all true. It was absolutely standard (British) English when I was growing up in the '80s.

Epicene they has been common all along. That's why curmudgeonly grammarians could never shut up about it--because it was so common. The recent innovation is the use of singular they in situations where gender would normally be assumed. For example, "Jane went to the restroom to comb their hair." Until recently that was jarring for most people--some more than others--even when they weren't invested in the culture wars.

TIL Usenet was in use in the 14th century.

What newsgroups did Chaucer post to?

Are you trying to claim that Chaucer used "they" as a gender neutral singular pronoun? That is extremely dubious considering that half of the Middle English speakers were still using <he> as the third person plural pronoun[1] (descended from Old English <híe> and unrelated to the third person masculine pronoun). Chaucer himself alternates between native Old English and Anglo-Norse forms depending on grammatical case and/or whim[2].

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he#Middle_English-they [2]: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunciation/gr.html...

> The thing about singular they is that it only really became "perfectly good usage for longer than people think" within the last few years, well after the heyday of Usenet.

The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender

It is in the Bible at least? There a million verses with “He who does not xxx… is“ that are intended to be gender neutral.

That depends on your translation - some translations will translate those to “They who do not”. Many of the ones who translate it as “he” are maintaining the Hebrew lack of gender neutrality, but that’s arbitrary. If the ancient Israelites spoke Finnish instead, the sentences would be gender neutral.

The bible wasn’t written in English. What exactly is your point?

For people who pass as male online, yeah. It makes me feel out of place any time it's happened to me.

When it comes to nicknames, sure, but that's not really the substance of a forum/channel/etc.