However, I feel no need to mention my gender or sexuality when introducing myself. If I didn't have a clearly female name, should I have said "Hi, I'm Pat, and I'm a female in the tech industry"?
I didn't mean (though it certainly sounded that way) that it's necessary for the reader to know your gender. Looking back, in fact, I realize that I weakened my position by even mentioning it (especially in the vague, imprecise way that I did).
I brought up gender because it was confusing (and I, along with other readers here, felt misled) when you – very casually, I might add – mentioned you were engaged to the CEO, up until which point I'd been under the false impression that you were a man.
So, to answer your question: no, you wouldn't have needed to inform the reader of your gender if you had an ambiguous name because what's really important here is not that you're a woman but that you're engaged to the CEO. Whether you're a man or a woman is irrelevant: all that is relevant is that you have a close personal history with the guy you're negotiating with, a fact which, again, completely skews the context of the article.
"Hi, I’m Michelle. I recently left my job as a technical consulting manager and joined my best friends and my fiancé, Kyle, at Keen.io (I wrote about that here <link>). This is the story of how I negotiated my compensation."
While I can see hedging your bets by having your spouse work a normal job (and possibly get you on their health insurance), if a failed startup is going to doom your marriage, your marriage is already doomed.
Because the tech industry is so heterosexual male-dominated, when I read that the author was engaged to the CEO, I first assumed I had misunderstood, then I thought the author was a gay man. Only upon reading further did I find that the author was a woman.
That confusion could've been cleared up in the first paragraph in which Michelle writes, "I’ve picked up quite a bit just by being around our CEO, Kyle, for the past few years." Why not tell us here why she's "been around" Kyle for so long? Further confusing the point, she mentions later that she's "friends with all of the founders." And engaged to the CEO might've been a helpful addition.
This kind of information completely changes the context of the advice – negotiating with a stranger is a completely different dynamic than negotiating with someone you (I assume) share a bed with.