Nesrie, I am one of the people you mentioned who "seem to think it's not okay for women to identify themselves as women while playing games or even on boards," however, you have misinterpreted my meaning. I am not a woman and therefore have no perception of how annoying or outraging it might be to be referred to by the incorrect pronoun, but I don't believe that the act of insisting on accuracy, in itself, is what is objectionable. What is objectionable is more of a broad attitude, something you say you encounter rarely but based on my experience is more common than you believe.
The central aspect of the objectionable attitude is the expectation special treatment, specifically on the basis of their gender. Typically girls with this attitude manage to forge large circles in which they are the absolute center of attention. The males go out of their way to impress her, agree with her, make exceptions for her, etc, all for the ultimiate goal of securing her favor and trying to "make something happen." This is irrational behavior on the male's part, but downright reprehensible on the female's part. In 99% of cases the girl has no intention of letting anything like that happen, and is just using her gender to procure this special treatment. This can take the form of getting teammates to overlook blatant gameplay errors during a a team performance analysis (for the sake of not hurting her feelings), or getting herself onto teams she doesn't deserve to be on based on merit alone.
Now not all girls are this way, and the ones that aren't are fine. During my entire time playing Guild Wars PvP (3+ years), the best monk parnter I ever had was female (there are typically 2 monks on an 8-person team, monk teamwork and synergy is very important). She made no secret of her gender but did not try to use it to secure special treatment, in fact she insisted on not being treated differently, and held the exact same disdain for the aforementioned objectionable attitude that I do. In fact, I think its fairly accurate to say that I was introduced to and convinced of the views I hold now, by her. We ended up playing together for about a year, and we were fucking awesome.
All that I expect is that no person get special treatment because of some trait that is completely irrelvent to what they are supposed to be graded on. For example, I know of many teams in Guild Wars which took in female members solely because some of their members had become infatuated by them, and subsequently the team began to stink because the female players were bad, but the male members made excuses for them. No male member would receive such treatment, he would be promptly cut like he deserved to be. I am NOT saying that all girls are bad (see my example in the last paragraph), what I am saying is that girls = people, and should be treated as such.
I hope this clears things up.
