When I think of me, I mock myself

I think about myself and my writing fairly often. You probably knew that. It struck me last night how gendered my writing is, meaning you can pretty much tell if I'm male or female. You can also piece together a lot of details about me based on the context of my writing. It is a scary thought somewhat, except I'm among friends here so it really doesn't matter. But it does amuse me to know how gendered my writing is.

The story that comes to mind when talking about how gender-specific my words and thoughts happened a year ago. Since it involves gender, you must deduce that the other party communicated with me without ever having seen me or heard my voice. He knew my name, but he couldn't tell a thing from it. You must have figured out by now that we probably communicated through something like e-mail, and we did. I contacted someone I didn't know, and I actually sent in my resume and everything when I contacted him. We exchanged a few e-mails, and I pretty much sealed the deal even though he had no idea what I am (excellent example of a gender-blind process) or what I was like as a person (I would say that this is dangerous even though ability should count more than character in certain processes). It didn't matter to him what I looked like but he realized that he needed to know my gender in order to refer to me; he could have written "It contacted me, and I refer it to you" but that makes me sound like an alien. Finally he asked me "Since I cannot deduce anything from your resume or e-mails, I'll have to ask you. Are you a man or a woman?"

It made me laugh.

All the resumes I've learnt to write since college (I didn't need to write a resume before college) don't have a place for gender or race. Because of this, economists and other social scientists have been able to carry out experiments with false resumes to check how gender and/or race biased employers are. (There is a bias in case you didn't know.) It makes perfect sense since we often should hire someone for their ability and not physical attributes. It didn't quite occur to me that the eventual discovery process would be so amusing.

Things are different elsewhere. Having come so far, I cannot go back to being forced to reveal my religion, race, gender and even ancestral origins without much contemplation and annoyance, even if it is the norm. Exactly why do you need so much information about me? Sure, I understand with gender, maybe race, but religion? I'm currently of the Jedi cult thank you. I might be converting to Tolkienism in the near future just coz I've always thought that elves must exist. And the Dutch think that American forms ask way too many personal questions. Wait till they find their way to Asia. Oh the wary look on faces when people get asked for their SSN; I know a land of people who compulsively write the equivalent on every piece of paper they can grab ahold of.

I didn't mean to mock others; I set out to mock myself. Someday I will write about ducks. And it'll be the funniest thing in the world