> Absolutely no one will confuse my bearded, balding, fat self for a “she”.

I was confused once when a doctor gave me the direction "follow him" and there was no male around. A definitely female nurse had just walked out, and that's who I was supposed to follow.

Nothing strange was going on; this happened in China. Chinese doesn't have gender distinctions in pronouns (except in the spelling...), and Chinese speakers aren't able to make the distinction consistently in extemporaneous speech.

The default is 'he', though, so I guess you're still safe from being called 'she'.

I mean, not everyone interacts with people in person at work. I would go so far as to say that most these profile settings are used for textual communication, where it's not always obvious, but where some people still get upset over the wrong pronoun being used (possibly because for then it's such a contentious topic in their lives it's hard to disambiguate honest mistakes from passive agressive purposeful behavior).

Like you, I also wish that pronouns weren't a big thing, but the truth is that right now society has shifted a bit to the point that it is, so rather than upset people over something I really don't care about, I just try to address people how they prefer to be addressed, while noting I have no preference and don't care if you get it wrong.

Someone else commented about how this is basically coming back full circle to the formalities of Sir/Madam or Mr/Ms in writing, maybe there’s something to it.