gender mistaken on forums

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I get called aggressive too

I can't work out the extent to which I should be able to exert more control over my emotions as opposed to the extent to which my brain isn't up to the task

I get the impression most people don't even have to think about it - they just automatically display socially appropriate behaviour

My inhibitory mechanism is definitely faulty

I've been using Internet forums such as this one for over a decade, and I can honestly say this is the first place I've ever encountered where the sex/gender of a person was not immediately obvious from that person's posting style...

Someone in the WP chatroom said they thought I was male because "males plod, but females walk delicately on their tiptoes."

Also, in another chatroom somebody said they thought I was male because I did not use emoticons.

The basis for both their reasoning seemed rather ridiculous to me.

That makes two of us.

I'm apparently a 30 year old male according to most people on the internet.

I wait until people use pronouns for themselves to use pronouns for people usually. Sometimes I'll check pronouns if the website offers a way to do so.

It is tough to tell on the internet. You can try to figure it out from a user's name or avatar, but even then its always a guessing game. I think a lot of us men don't think there are many autistic women out there, and assume a bit too much. I'll have to try to stay neutral whenever I'm not sure.

I actually assumed you were female because of your alias before clicking on the thread.

You can always click on a poster's name to see what their gender is listed as in their profile.

The picture would have caused me to make this mistake. The first post I saw from you, you identified as a girl, though.

OP, Your username definitely says 'female' to me and I've never mistaken you for male because of that. But, maybe that's because I'm British, so I know what a baby buggy is.

I'll usually check the profile to verify the sex of the poster if it seems relevant.

As Mummy_of_peanut writes, I would just assume than anyone who used a user name of Babybuggy would likely be female.

On a slight tangent, something I find interesting is that every now and then as I am reading a post, I will spot a particular word useage or and expressed attitude and I will get a strong sense of the sex of the poster. I'm not always right, but my accuracy is probably around 80%. It doesn't mean much, but it's an interesting game to see if I can pick up on subtle cues.

i am not interested in finding out the gender behind the posts that i read.

That's probably a moot point on an autistic forum. Direct and to the point communication is so much easier than "sugarcoating", and tiptoeing around what you're actually trying to convey.

I don't bother with people's genders. They're irrelevant to me. The trouble is that there's no proper non-gendered personal pronouns out there for the English language that don't sound awkward. You'll often see me using things like "s/he" or "they", but the grammar nut in me wants to correct "they" to singular.