Fangenderqueer?

It becomes ever more obvious that, in a number of ways, I'm a boy. It began when I hung around with my brothers' mates as a teenager. It continued when I came to fandom in my late teens, and when I came to online fandom in my mid-twenties. I didn't think of myself as male. For example, as a young fan, I identified with the powerful female characters in the comics I was reading, including the villainesses. But I didn't really think of myself as female, either. Discussing the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival recently, which has long excluded transwomen who don't "share the experience of growing up under patriarchy", I wondered if I'd qualify as a woman by that definition, lacking so many female experiences: never been raped, never experienced intimate violence, never been pregnant. For that matter, I've only worn makeup a handful of times. Since adolescence, I've dressed like a boy in jeans, T-shirts, and shirts, prompting jokes from cow orkers when I've occasionally turned up in a frock. As a teenager, I had profound crushes on male actors and pop stars, but they weren't shared with other girls. I didn't squee until I was an adult and encountered other fangirls on the Internet.

I've snagged a bunch of academic books about the net, fandom, and women, and have rapidly confirmed something I've suspected for quite a while: online, I act like a man. The way I disagree with other fangirls, sometimes the fact that I do disagree out loud, is a characteristically male style of net.interaction: the "bald assertion", with no attention paid to salving the feelings of the person I'm taking to task or the solidarity of the group, no apologies or reassurances. (I know you're sophisticated enough a reader that I don't have to disclaim that all men don't act like that. Nor that some women do act like that, especially in the middle of a posting about how I act like that.)

Online fandom was long dominated by men, just as the net itself was emphatically male for a very long time. In the late nineties, this began to change, as the proportion of women online caught up with the men. But as Rhiannon Bury points out in Cyberspaces Of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online, many fangirls took one look at the fanboys on Usenet, turned around, and formed their own, private mailing lists. So not only were there actually fewer of us online, we were less visible.

Many of us did participate in both public and private fora, of course: I was part of the SFLAE/BS as well as a noisy participant on the r.a.s.* hierarchy. This meant I was in contact with a lot more female Star Trek fans than I was with female Doctor Who fans (although this changed in 1996, with the arrival of the PMEB). When it came to Who fandom, this only reflected my experience IRL: both Australian and British Doctor Who fandom were majority male (and substantially gay). In the US, Who fandom was majority female, like media fandom in general.

The upshot of this is that I learned to communicate online while surrounded by men. I learned to argue through hard experiences on Usenet newsgroups like soc.men and alt.feminism, which had an overwhelming hostile atmosphere, especially towards women and feminists. Despite increasing contact with female fans, for a very long time my fannish thought and activity was that of a fanboy: discussions about continuity and canonicity and ratings. Unlike the DDEBers interviewed by Bury, I wasn't attracted to shows primarily for the characters, but for the SFnal concepts: I watched The X-Files first and foremost because it was about UFOs and stuff. But again, I never thought of myself as male. When fanboys dissed fangirls, I was in there defending us and our despised activities: drooling, squeeing, slashing, etc.

I'm perfectly capable of acting like a girl online, of course - it's just that I keep forgetting to do it. Although, if anything, I'm more aware of my gender online than off, probably because the net is where I do almost all my interacting with other people. Bury refers to the "dream of disembodiment", the hope that cyberspace would erase differences and make us all equal. But rather than dropping all assumptions, netizens just fell into the assumption that everyone else was White, middle-class, male, university educated, and American. We bring our gender with us into cyberspace, whether we like it or not.

More on this subject as I wade through all these books. Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

(This is the earliest Usenet posting of mine that Google records.)

(ETA: No, this is!)