QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 22nd February 2009, 12:47am) 
QUOTE(Hell Freezes Over @ Sun 22nd February 2009, 1:16am)
...I always picked up a female vibe from Kylu, and I can't think of her as anything other than female, even after being told she doesn't have a woman's body. I think we're witnessing a relaxation of the male-female distinction. The Internet conveys the "voice," not physicality, and it's liberating -- people can be what they want to be, or what they've always felt they really were. At what point you cross the line into actual dishonesty isn't all that clear.
Oh, I think that's clear enough - and it occurs as soon as you allude to your not being what you say you are. The line between "harmless fun" and "potentially harmful deception" is probably the line you're thinking of - you have to go a little further to cross that one.
Going back to this for a bit:
QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 22nd February 2009, 12:07am)
There was also this template in his userspace, which struck me as an odd sort of thing for him to be doing, under the circumstances.
This template is actually a good example of template code-trickery. Using it actually produces this, which strikes me as not at all what you'd expect from a female WP'er, particularly one who was making an effort to be a helpful administrator (not that that stops anybody, I suppose)...
[...]
One other thing: I still don't believe the person behind the Poetlister & related accounts was impersonating real women because of some sexual predilection, though I realize some will call me naive for thinking that. I actually believe he was doing it because it gave the accounts pre-packaged "legitimate" backstories, and he believed this would make it easier to prove they were separate, distinct people when challenged. If he thought he'd get better results by making up the "IRL" identities out of whole cloth, that's probably what he would have done. Bear in mind that he was violating WP:AUTO the whole time, and guarding the article on himself was probably his primary motive, at least initially.
Umm, this entire discussion could benefit from examination of WHY we feel annoyed or even outraged when we find we've been conversing with a man when we thought it was a woman, or even a homely woman when we thought she was a good-looking one.
What WAS the purpose of the discussion in the first place? 
Likewise, what is the PURPOSE of the discussions on WikiChix? 
Now, there are various answers. One of them is that gender is a thing that is probably wired right down into our unconscious cortexes, and it's not violated lightly. And I believe that women are actually more conscious of it than men. They dress their 6 week-olds in pink or blue. In the past, when I've tried to name neutered pets with names that seemed suitable to me, but if they weren't gender-correct, such as if I was trying to name a female cat Blackbeard or Einstein or Frank, all the women in my life have had frigging fits. I've had surreal conversations like: Me: "Hell, the CAT doesn't even know what sex it is." "It's a SHE, and yes, SHE does" To which the only answer is "Yes, dear..."
As with some languages where there are vestiges of genderizing every noun (sort of like primitive religions where we personify all inanimate objects), there are still religions where it is insisted that gender is some immutable property of the universe. Mormons, for example, believe pre-incarnate souls have gender-- even if not genitalia! And presumably thus God has to get the body right when sending the soul. Which begins to create the social havoc that transgendered or ambiguous genitalia people have to deal with. And Mormons are not the only religion where such nuttiness continues. If it wasn't such an innate part of human thinking, such prejudice wouldn't survive (nor the various complicated outgrowths of animism, object personification, and spiritualism, either, for that matter).
Like so many others, I find the experience of communicating with strangers by email/net, where you don't see the face or even see handwriting, to be invigorating and enlightening. Yes, you are actually seeing a bit of somebody's naked mind. And isn't that interesting?
Why is it that we feel violated when presented with two aspects of the same mind, and think we're dealing with two different people, ala socks? Do we not present various aspects of ourselves to different parts of the world, according to circumstance? Do you not feel the strain when you're forced to deal with two groups at once, such as bringing your family to work? Having the wife accidently meet the mistress while you're there? Damn, I hate that.
Kidding.
I actually enjoy it. 
The truth is that we all contain multitudes, our name is Legion, and some of us are better at it than others. All those Shakespeare and Dickens characters were Shakespeare and Dickens! As also the odd people we meet in our dreams, who, are all of them, really us. Get used to it. There are lots of ego-level personalities running on our brains all the time; most of them surpressed and unconscious when we're awake, but all of them babbling and trying to feed us ideas nonetheless.Much of this only gets to the "interest" phase, unless you're an identity-freak like you're a gender-freak, and you get completely weirded out if you can't tell if the housecat in front of you has balls or not.
Otherwise, we come down to issues of power. Ben Franklin, my favorite genius, was always said to contain a harmonious multitude of people, all of whom he made work for him. And he was very good at politics, also, as when he managed to play the rustic American bumpkin, brilliant scientist, man of the world, and effective ambassidor for his country's interests, all at the same time. Changing the course of history by securing France's support of the nascient USA. But early in his life at age 15, Franklin got into trouble with his brother for writing letters to the paper his older brother published, under the penname of Mrs. Silence Dogood. His autobiography starts with this trouble. And the issue there was power. Mrs. Dogood was getting popular. James Franklin had no idea the writer was his little-brother. When it blew up, Ben Franklin left an apprenticeship illegally. We've heard a similar story again and again and again on the internets, with other people.
Nobody much cares if the characters you create for yourself are interesting, but as a society, we DO care of they start to have influence. Dickens may have had 50 interesting characters, but we don't want him to have 50 votes in the general election. That was the problem here on WR with Baxter the Poetbeast, and on WP with SOCKS. They vote.
We even care a bit if they seem to amass unfair influence, like when some doofus actor who plays a doctor or lawyer is asked to speak to doctors or lawyers at conventions, or ends up promoting some pill on TV. We have the feeling that social power here was gained by acting, by use of an artificial personna to gain the privileges which by rights should only apply to somebody who has done the work. And on Wikipedia, this is a particular problem, inasmuch as we have no way of assessing who is a dog or a doctor or a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Our fairness-detectors start to complain.
Powercircles (at last we get to WikiChix) pull some of the same strings. When we get blindsided by a bloc-vote on something, and this is from people who all seem to be bland independent thinkers coming to the same conclusions because they are reasonable, and we find later that they've been conversing and conspiring behind the scenes so that they all are of one-mind about what to do, we feel somewhat fooled again. Fooled by the acting. And the issue again is power. It's WP:MEAT, but pulled by a group which is a bit short of salami, so to speak. But nonetheless playing a game that needs to be talked about more openly.
This essay is too long already, but all in all, I have to say that I rather enjoy the various roleplayers and personas which abide on the internet, so I'm not particularly a sole-identity-freak or gender-Nazi. Until such things begin to be used in a powergame to outmaneuver me. Then, I start to get annoyed, and decide that it's time to fight fire with fire. One reason I'm here. I didn't start this. But now that it's been used against me, I think I now get to play the same "game" legitimately.
Milton
