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I'm glad that this "gender of poster" subject was brought up. This is something I was thinking about quite a lot. Gender has an important role in human interactions in the "real world". In this virtual world it is missing sometimes. English is a gender-neutral language. First and second person don't have a gender (as in "I" and "you" are genderless). So the gender of the participants is almost never showing in the content of forum posts. I tend to have a picture of posters in my head, and sometimes I find out it has the wrong gender! Other languages are less gender-neutral. In Hebrew verbs relating to the first person have gender, so in Hebrew forums you almost always know the poster's gender. I don't claim that this is important, but I notice the difference between English and Hebrew forums in this respect.
Another thing more on the topic of this thread: I said I have a picture in my mind of the poster when I read a post. Another thing I noticed when the EMD photo page was new, that even after I saw the pictures, when reading posts the former images persisted, even though I was aware that the poster looked very different in the photo! (though in time the photos did win).
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