Hm? Not particularly. I do have an interest in the gender stuff in politics a bit more, and in the workforce – in part because I had my early-life career goals dramatically changed after receiving rejection letters explicitly stating I was removed from the government worker app pool here in Canada for not identifying as either a woman, or a minority race. Almost all the friends I graduated with were in those categories, and got easy job placements with worse transcripts and less prior work experience. So I recognise that my personal history has a reason for a negative bias to these topics that others may not have experienced. That said, my personal take for what it’s worth, is that DEI and equity efforts are worthwhile/valuable, but that their implementation is poorly done, and is indiscernible from discrimination on an individual basis. So, not black and white as it were.
For online discussions, I do think it’s misguided to get annoyed about gendering, and that introducing explicit gender oriented stuff causes equity issues in weird, unnecessary ways. So I disagree with both the idiots going overboard about gender stuff on a car forum, and the op attempting to claim gendered-privilege on a digital forum. I think it’s just as reasonable for someone to take a stance of “You’re a man until proven otherwise online”, as it is for someone to get pissed off that people don’t believe their a stated gender of some sort; none of that gender stuff has much point in a digital space, so they’re equally silly. And while we talk about toxic masculinity, we also fail to really coalesce behind a definition of positive masculinity – and we don’t tend to talk as much about toxic female traits.
Another item worth highlighting, particularly for the ops case, is that it’s been a known ‘thing’ amongst people on the net for a long time, that the best way to get help for something like a problem, was to post up a question on a ‘female’ looking account, and then to respond to your own post with a male account and an incorrect answer talking down to the woman for being stupid. White-knights tend show up to make corrections and hand-hold the supposed woman, downvote the mean bad man, and so on. That sort of structure is another issue introduced by bringing gender into digital spaces – but because it tends to work in favour of women it’s generally ignored/accepted.
Feminism, in both meat space and digital space, isn’t about equality but about removing pain points for women exclusively – so cases of discrimination that benefit women / disadvantage men are generally ignored by supposed ‘equity’ movements that are fundamentally pushed by feminist interests. That disjointed equity/feminist division is one reason, I’d theorize at least, that things like the manosphere and harsh women’s rights pushbacks gained popularity in some segments. If you’re going to bring gender online, and complain about the issues women face when they attempt to assert their gender, without looking at how it impacts others’ experience of those online spaces, nor are you looking at the positives they get for asserting that gender, I think it’s wrong. I try to maintain a more egalitarian mindset, or at least I like to think I do, where people online should generally all be treated equitably… as non-gendered faceless anonymous entities.
And to that end, as gender doesn’t matter for posting to some car forum, the op should’ve just posted stuff as a non-gendered faceless blob. Then she’d get treated as a non-gendered faceless blob. No one would care to respond to her, or rather, they’d respond to her about as much as they’d respond to a guy, or any other non-gendered blob.
Talonflame (she/her)
TrippyHippyDan
UrPartnerInCrime
Balerion
fushuan [he/him]
TrackinDaKraken
hmmm
Hamartiogonic