Averted with this she-troper's friend; People mistake him for a woman on some of the forums he frequents pretty consistantly. By this point, he's too lazy to correct them when they refer to him as 'she', which led to an interesting moment when a confused user asked '(username), are you a boy or a girl?' after hearing said friend refer to himself as 'he'. My friend's answer? "Whatever you want me to be, toots."

This troper has lost track of how many times he's been mistaken for a girl. I typically use a gender-neutral name on forums and such and never particularly try to avoid saying I'm male, but without fail has been labelled 'the cute redhead girl' in more than one group. Note also that I never mentioned my hair color, which isn't red. On a couple of occassions when I announced that I was a guy... I was not believed.

Maybe you just have a "cute redhead girl" personality?

gender-neutral name... you mean something like Pippi?

World of Warcraft tends to be like this. No one is a girl until you hear them on vent. On the other hand, it's inverted by Fanfiction.Net. There are no guys there. :)

This male troper ''knows'' there's girls on them there Internets; I go to LJ for three of my primary fandoms (including the nifty ''GirlGenius'' comm Agatha's Minions) and they're in the majority. It's a lot less inflammatory.

I used to use the name "Captain Benny" a lot, so was undoubtably mistaken for male. It was funny when I revealed my gender; about half the people supported me, the others didn't pay attention and kept referring to me as he. Now, it's a little more obvious, and I make it clear quickly. I hate being called a guy.

This troper used a picture of a male Star Wars character as her avatar for three years... and finally mentioned to the forum at large she was indeed female, and ten years younger than they thought. Suddenly all those references to attractive male characters made sense!

This troper has a female friend who plays ''TeamFortress2''. Once after she used voice chat, another player tried to state this, which led to everybody else trolling him. His feeble attempts at countertrolling caused hilarity to ensue. Eventually everyone turned against him, including one guy who claimed to usually be the troll on servers, "so you know it's bad when ''I'm'' the voice of reason." All the while my friends and I were laughing our asses off at how badly he was getting screwed.

This troper has pretty much stopped admitting that she's a {{Meganekko}} ChineseGirl over the internet (except in very, very rare cases) because of the immediate {{Squee}} reaction from everybody else.

This troper once made the mistake of speaking out loud during a raid in [=WoW=]. People were so busy shouting and trying to figure out who was letting their "girlfriend" use his speaker that we all died.

This troper apparently comes across as male, not only in [=RPG=]s, but also in actual online debates. As well as, apparently, a ''gay'' male. To my irritation. I've actually had people confront me and say that they've seen through my ruse, and that they "know" my actual gender, and that it's all right, they aren't judging... or alternately, I've had people mistake me for a GIRL when I use ''actual'' profile pictures and get their shorts in a bunch, or begin furiously calling me a faggot.

This male troper often gets the opposite. Although he looks nothing like a girl he gets mistaken for a girl in activities that don't involve seeing him....A LOT! Even outside of the internet, like on the phone... am I really that feminine? I often just specify right off the bat that I'm a guy to avoid this. (Oddly I often use the name Mikey in my screen name, so I wonder how many girls are running around with the name Mikey?)

This troper feels your pain. Gets especially annoying when everyone insists on calling you "Ma'am" or "Miss". I have at least one official document that I need to get fixed thanks to that. Strangely, anyone who has heard of me in real life are completely unaffected and notice no change whatsoever on the phone.

{{Griffin}} is apparently a masculine name. People have commonly referred to her with a male pronoun. Eh, but get a load of this: she encountered a crazy self-proclaimed Mexican noob on a forum who declared that everyone on the Internet who said they were a girl were "just faking" because girls don't use the Internet. People called him sexist. He said, "I'm not sexist, I just don't think girls have the ability to use the Internet." A female mod banned him.

That made me laugh twice. For the guy, and for the female mod proving him right.

Er, how did the banning prove him right? It's not like you can be a mod without using Internet.

Depending on the banning rules of the forum, of course. If the 'Mexican noob' was using civil language, and the rules do not outright say that being sexist is just cause for banning, then his point that girls don't have the ability to use (i.e. cannot handle) the Internet is correct, insofar as (and let's face this, it's true) the Internet is filled to the brim with sociopathic-acting individuals, and one needs skin as thick as an elephant's. Notwithstanding a mod's Godlike powers, and huge chunks of the story may be missing, but one would expect a mongo classic smackdown from said female mod before using the banhammer.

I don't want to belong a forum where the rules don't say being sexist is a just cause for banning... I mean, seriously. Who wants to deal with rampant and flaming sexism all the time?

Griffin again. May I add that said noob had just posted some very poorly written and possibly racist fanfic and was flaming everyone who insulted it, including claiming they were racist for saying bad things about said fanfic? Then he made another story where the ButtMonkey was named after a member who had been giving him "constructive" criticism (it was so bad it was hard to be constructive). Then he had quite a bit of argument with several other members before the mod came in to end it with the banhammer. Of course, by the time she saw it, the threads were locked and were past history, so all she did was visit and try to piece together what happened. (http://serebiiforums.com/search.php?searchid=9544638 Click that link and check out all the stuff he wrote. From bottom to top.) Oh, BTW, gkong3, your claim that the mod was not being sensible is an insult to the intelligence and judgement of said mod, as well as the judgment of the admin of the forum, who IS able to choose mods properly.

Small net. I remember being (mostly) on the sidelines of an IRC oper war involving half the Serebii.net staff. (Note: This was about six years ago.)

This troper has a friend, also a female, who once encountered a guy in a IRC chat about scifi who thought this. In order to prove her gender, she spent half an hour talking about menstruating, tampons and pads.

This troper (who is male) is nearly nine times out of ten, thought to be a girl. Doesn't help the troper sports a female avatar and usually stays to gender-neutral topics but still! Gets real awkward when guys have said they had a crush on you...

It happens to me a lot. I usually use a pic of one of my favorite anime characters as my avatar, and it doesn't help that most of them are guys. Or that I roleplay as them, too.

{{Night}} thinks it's a little weird one-third of the people he's considered convincingly female turn out to be males who intend to seek a sex change. (Up to four, as against eight actual females.) At least he has ''yet'' to guess wrongly.

That's kind of insulting. I *am* an actual female, not a 'male seeking a sex change.' Also: Is this the place to bitch about people going I KNEW there were no girls on the internet when they find out I'm trans?

Missing the point. These were people who intended to seek a sex change but had yet to actually do so or frequently even try to. If they already had, they would have fallen into the female category, at least for me. As for the bitching: feel free.

Um. Dude. You're treading into dangerous waters with your line of reasoning here, since there's a lot of transsexuals whose BerserkButton is people insisting that they're not really the gender they identify as unless they've had a sex change. (Also, go read the description part of EasySexChange. It's harder to get that kind of operation than you seem to think, at least in most Western countries.) It's easy and intuitive to assume that your sex is determined by whether you have a penis or a vagina, but it's actually quite difficult to nail down any ironclad physical criteria for being male or female when you really think about it -- for example, there are genetic oddities that can lead to men having two X chromosomes or women having XY chromosomes, and most people would agree that a man who loses his penis in an accident or to disease doesn't stop being a man because of it -- so it's best just to take people at their word about what gender they are; it saves everyone a lot of headaches. Or at least you could change your phrasing, since it would be less offensive and still get your point across if you just said they weren't born female.

From a purely scientific POV, sex (male, female, etc) is determined by your chromosones. Gender (man, woman, etc) is a social construct. One is biological, the other is the social label/group you identify with.

This Troper was in a little shock upon discovering the forumer he was addressing to be actually male. Kind of the other way through, huh?

A rather significant proportion of this troper's WoW guild is female, including the guildmaster. So I'm used to girl gamers and don't find it particularly strange (although I still assume that any random person I meet in WoW is a guy until proven otherwise). However, there was one case where I was taken by surprise: I didn't know that one of my guildmates, with whom I've talked with quite often, was female till she mentioned it in a passing. She plays a male character and while I'm used to guys playing female characters, the opposite is much rarer.

In an inversion, I assume most people I chat to are female.

Same. Strangely, about half of them assume I am male.

This Tropette has this happen to her a lot. Methinks I need to be joining different forums.

This troper has had this happen to her. It probably stems in part from her tendency to use her first name as part of an all-lowercase username, with the result that people reading it mistake her for a "Michael A." The weird thing? This happens most often on a forum that's probably 80% female.

When posting on /co to a thread about favourite hot characters of kid's movies, she was called gay/fag approximately a billion time before, about half an hour later, someone realized it might possibly be that this troper is female... which led to the following quote: "If you are a guy and gay for Simba, that's disgusting, if you are a girl... that's fucking hot." Uhm. Thanks.

It happened to this troper, that another girl fell in love with her because she thought this troper was male. Although, nowadays it won't happen, because cat nicks are considered female.

This troper confesses she was quite shocked when she found out an artist whose slashy MetalGear fanart she likes was a dude, and a straight one at that. Whenever a fanfiction author turns out to be male she can't help being surprised either, even when it is fanfic for mostly male fanbases, like superhero comic books or videogames. There Are No Boys On Live Journal/FF.net/[=DeviantArt=]?

Slightly subverted with this male Troper. He RPs a female character, but it's plainly on his profile that he's male. People usually refer to him as "she" anyway, and he doesn't mind, and in fact quietly encourages as it helps him stay in-character. It doesn't help that his character hangs out with a "confirmed" female player. But the one time a friend came on the RP site and referred to him as "he" caused a bit of an uproar... "(Troper) is guy? No way!" Five seconds later..."I checked his profile. I thought you were a girl, (Troper)"

This female troper finds this trope pretty ridiculous. Everywhere she's been on the internet has been either female-dominated or about equal, and she doesn't only hang out on Livejournal and Deviantart. In fact, she knows several girls who pretend to be guys online to avoid the reactions to this trope, especially in certain areas (cough-4chan).

There aren't that many obviously male people on Livejournal. But there are almost no men on the My Neoromance forum, or the Hanako Games forum.

Same here; on most weebsites I visit I assume everyone to be female until at least suggested otherwise, and I know one female who pretends to be male because she was tired of (male) people she chatted with assuming she must be completely clueless about tech, only interested in "girly" topics, etc.

This is quite thoroughly averted in this troper's main fandom, ''WarriorCats'', enough so that it causes her to automatically do a double-take every time she sees a name with the word 'male' underneath it.

This troper was playing ''[=TF2=]'' with his girlfriend watching and using a headset to chat with/taunt a friend on the opposing team. Said friend started freaking out when he realised she was there and eventually came up with the brilliant line "You're just pretending she's there to psych me out. Women don't game. They... they ''can't''.''

This Troper made a Facebook post one day and, inadvertently, informed one of her friends that she was also a /b/tard. He was extremely surprised, to say the least. And then, probably the best thing ever to happen to he did: he made a thread on /b/. About her. She almost teared up, except then everyone started posting their (hilariously) sexist demotivators.

Inverted. In PhantasyStar Online this troper was playing a [=HUnewearl=], a class that is a melee character with moderate magic ability. This class is ALWAYS female, meaning cross gendered characters in this game (Because all classes had a set gender) was pretty common. Which made it weird that everyone I played with assumed I was a girl. Tired of this, I just decided to play along and even flirt with the next person to do it. To the amusement of me and my friends, when I told him I was a guy, he demanded I call him to prove it, refusing to believe it.

Inverted for Fandom_Wank and related comms; members are assumed female until stated otherwise, both by outsiders and other members. We even have a list and a meme.

This troper gets it doubly, both in WoW and on phones, where people think I'm my mother. On WoW, where I don't have a microphone for various reasons not worth going into, it's reached the point where it's a running debate whether I'm a guy or not. I find it amusing and refuse to comment other than to agree with the currently leading opinion that I am a robot/AI. And then I make Cylon jokes.

This Troper, being female obviously addicted to the internet, is for some reason often mistaken to be a male at first. And then, when I reveal my actual gender...

Once on an MMO, my avatar was wearing a ghost sheet over her head, and I had to clarify which gender I was to quite a few people who asked. Which is weird...you'd think the username Loviballet would tip them off...

DokEnkephalin: I've always had a good radar for this, I can always tell. I never make a big deal out of it, I rarely even tell anyone unless I'm living with them irl, I simply keep it in mind. I've almost always heard later about the revelation and big drama it causes. The one time I didn't detect a [=GIRL=], she actually confessed to me that she was a pre-op TV...awkward, but that doesn't mean we can't be friends. When I had lunch with her irl, I still couldn't tell -- she looked like a girl, walked like a girl, and ''smellled'' like a girl.

This troper tends to get mistaken for male a ''lot'', since I tend to like a lot of stereotypically "male" things (giant robots, scifi in general, D&D, computers, HTML, electronic gadgets, etc.) and because my behavior contains very little of the stereotypical "fangirl" traits. Generally when they find out I'm female after all (often due to me casually using feminine pronouns to refer to myself, or talking about strictly feminine concerns), the reaction is generally complete surprise, followed shortly by, "Hey, awesome, a girl who likes our stuff!"

This Troper is a girl, but hides as a guy on some websites because of boys who can't keep their brains out of their hardware........

Surprisingly inverted with the {{Metalocalypse}} internet fanbase, to the point where male fans are fairly uncommon. This very female fan knows five guys who're into the show, compared to the countless female fans she's met.

This female troper is often mistaken as male because, while she goes by a female-only name (Reiko), that name ending sounds traditionally masculine to those from English-speaking countries. She also happens to invert this trope -- she happens to automatically think everyone online is female unless it's somehow obvious.

This female troper has been mistaken as a gay/bi male and tranny, despite (or maybe because of?)having a feminine handle. Instead of getting annoyed, though, this troper and her friends who are aware of her gender are just more than glad to play along.

Strangely, on the forum I regularly post on, most of the members are female.

Same here. One time, there was even an "are you a boy or a girl?" poll, and girls outnumbered boys 3 to 1.

This troper is named Ashley. He's known on the forums as Ashley, the One who's gonna MindRape you if you think Ashley's a female name.

Eh, I've heard of stranger names (No offense meant). Personally, the fact that Leslie, Shelby, Hilary and Marion were all originally male names still boggles her mind.

This troper usually uses a gender-neutral username and is often mistaken for a guy. She corrects them, and if her friends happen to be in the forum thread, HilarityEnsues.

This troper (a girl) plays ''GuildWars''. Frequently in-game and on the Guild Wars Guru forums she is referred to as a guy. She also is ''still'' kicking herself for not taking advantage of this frequent confusion when some random idiot tried to convince her to leave her boyfriend to be his girlfriend...

This troper was not only called a he multiple times online (despite the clearly female avatar and feminine pronouns used in reference to herself) but is often called a male in real life due to short hair. This troper also has a quite sizable chest. Hmm.

This male troper was greatly mistaken for a girl when he posted at the forums of this all-female {{Quake}} clan back in the late 90's. He was just being genuinely friendly (apparently it was a kind of rule that males were vulgar or something). He had no idea of what was going on until one of the girls began putting up a webpage listing her online friends and their genders. When he saw his listed as "female", he pointed it out to be incorrect, much to the girl's embarrassment. Apparently TheReveal wasn't that amusing to the others and he eventually became persona-non-grata to that clan (fortunately by then he was good friends with a rival all-female clan, and several others).

This (genderqueer) troper is rarely mistaken for male, because her username (despite not being an English noun) takes a typically feminine form. Unfortunately, she's also hit a more specific version of there being no ''young'' girls on the internet. It's... a rather depressing story. After a charming amount of childhood sexual abuse, this troper spent some time in her tweenaged life having cybersex with strangers online. Most took it for granted that she was another grown adult who was just into ageplay. The one time a guy did realize that I was actually that old, well... he seemed to realize that this was rather TroublingUnchildhoodBehavior of me, and actually showed concern for my well-being.

This troper is one of the few gals on her favorite sites.

This troper began using the internet in 1996 and started becoming an active participant on a message board (concerning fandom of a New Wave musical artist) in mid-1997, where this trope was completely turned on its head by the fact that the majority of its participants were women. In fact, the most unusual part about my being there was my age, since I was about ten years younger than the vast majority of the board denizens. But she -- I -- noticed that outside that environment, it did seem as though there were few women participating online, so if I left a comment on a news site or blog, I never mentioned my gender nor used my very feminine-centric (at the time) ''nom de Internet''. I do wonder now if those people were aware that a teenaged girl was leaving those comments.

This troper uses internet for at least 11 years and since then she learned that whenever she speaks english,is hard to guess a gender of the other user,since in her native polish,everyone put gender on words.It also happens all the time on youtube when she posts a video,because she got pretty crude sense of humor so naturaly,everyone commenting on her vids think she's a guy

This troper frequents a male dominated message board. She employs a highly feminine username, but has made no reference to her gender. So far, she's been referred to in male pronouns three times.

I have been mistaken for a male so many times, I've had to put the fact that I was female on my signature.

I am endlessly amused at how often I'm mistaken for a straight man roughly 2-5 years older than my actual age. Even more amusing is how quickly threads in various forums have mysteriously cleaned up their language after I mentioned this fact (never in a "OMG, I'm a gurl!" way; usually just to point out that X is not exclusively enjoyable to people of the male persuasion, or that not all women act a certain way/think a certain way) even though I myself have a bit of a mouth on me when I've gotten comfortable in an online community.

This Troper is a male who was regularly mistaken for female. It started when I used my friend's account on Neopets (it was _Coat_Hanger_) when I joined up for a Batman roleplaying group. I revealed that I was male shortly thereafter, and changed the gender. Four years and several accounts later, in one of the last RPs we did, one of the group's founders asked "Wait... Since when was Coaty male?"

This tropette is a member of Towers Times Forum, a fansite about Alton Towers. The forum's major demographic is male, more than 75%. Whilst the amount of females is less than 25% and only about 5-10 are regulars. We also have meets and there are always more men then there are women. This has caused a ongoing gag that TTF is a pick up place for gays interested in theme parks.

This Tropette frequents the {{Panthera}}-forums as KingdomKey. Apparently the male screenname coupled with my general attitude convinced D.Z. I'm male.

This Troper simply assumes anyone on the internet is male unless they state otherwise, as most of the people he frequently speaks to happen to be male. However, this Troper does not demand any proof of one's claim to be female.

This Troper has often been mistaken for a boy on various forums(being referred to as "he" and "him"), following me correctiong them ["no, I'm actually a "she", a girl". Mostly happens when I use unisex or more "boyish-sounding nicks, but has also happened when my name was more feminine-sounding. Maybe it's because often, most of the forum members are male, and is used to calling everyone "he" and "him"(plus, there's no "gender" option on profiles many places) but still... (When I'm unsure about another memer's gender, I mostly refer to them as "them/they" or "(s)he" until their gender becomes known. This was the case with a member who no one really know if was a girl or boy until she mentioned being a girl in one of her posts.)

This Troper recently discovered that All Tabletop Gaming Forum Members Are Male Until Notice Is Given Otherwise (and doubly so if the forum member mentions a female significant other). This despite the troper living in a PinkBishoujoGhetto of gamers, where the only non-female tabletop gamers under 30 that the troper knows in real life are a casual TheLoonie and at least one serious FTM transperson.

This troper and her troper best friend both play Team Fortress 2. My friend's username does happen to have "Girl" in it, while mine is a bit more ambiguous. One night we were playing, and someone on our team said over the mic, "OH MY GOD, IS THAT A GIRL ON THE INTERNET?" Without missing a beat, my friend said (over the mic), "No, of course not! There are no girls on the internet!" I joined in, informing the poor guy that we weren't actually here, and that we were a figment of his imagination. He gave us a baffled, "Oh, okay." and that was the end of that.

Robrecht recently encountered a guy who completely screwed up his credibility in the community they're both a part of and then came back the same day after pissing off half the people in it and claimed that he had the same IP because he was 'the sister of the person who was previously using that computer'. This despite not changing mannerisms and without explaining why 'she' would even be interested in joining the community only after 'her brother' made a complete ass of himself. The 'new girl' insists on calling me sexist for not accepting 'she' is a girl.

This is always hilarious to hear from people. It's especially funny when you most commonly hear it on nerdy forums and it's obvious less girls would want to associate with people who shout "omg girl, ur awesome". It's pathetic and shameful how a lot of those guys act and thats why women aren't frequent there.

The way I see it is, it's pretty split evenly. However, the people who make a ''show'' of being female are either the GIRLs, or just girls attention-whoring. This could be why people think there's few women on the internet, because they don't make a huge show about it.

The thing is, I don't know where you guys are coming from, but whenever I have gone to something traditionally male-oriented (such as when I attended the midnight launch of Reach), I wasn't met with shock, skepticism, etc. It was "oh hey, you here for Reach? Cool." I was treated like a regular person, really. Shit, I got called "bro." YMMV on whether this is a good thing or not, but to me, it felt liberating.

Did I mention I attended the launch in a flowery white knee-length dress and high heels and had long hair? Butch gamer girl ''my ass!''

Complete reversal for this troper. I'm an avid roleplayer (Invisionfree, not LJ) and have been for years. I could count the number of guys I've rp'd with on my fingers. On Caution 2.0, a resource site, there's even a thread for buttons about guys with slogans like 'Guys on Caution: They're like unicorns." or "I know there are guys on Caution because I saw one. Once."

I've also had some interesting "tits or GTFO"-related moments while playing TeamFortress2, similar to those mentioned above. Some memorable examples:

I get myself a mic and the guys on the server I frequented realize that "Slugo" is, in fact, a teenage girl. Not only is everyone suddenly much nicer to me and more interested in who I am but several guys start asking me for ''relationship advice''. Guy on playing on the internet? Normal. Girl playing on the internet? Absolutely ''fascinating.''

Later, because of the voice, guys had a tendency to automatically assume I was a prepubescent boy before asking if I was a girl. At one point, a new guy to the server told me, sounding ''absolutely'' dumbfounded, "''Dude''....You sound like a ''CHICK''."

This troper used to be part of a clan on DarkOrbit, with a very obviously female clanmate. In teamspeak situations, whenever a new clan member joined, they would automatically ask her for "pics". She always took it in good humour, but it annoyed the rest of us, and they often got kicked for it.

Ultimate trolling fun: Going to sites like 4chan and pretending to be a boy who is pretending to be a girl. When you actually are a girl. Looking at the Quantcast statistics, it appears that there are thousands of women doing exactly that.