Gender-Switching in Cyberspace - Do Boys Just Wanna Have Fun?

    e.. Disguised as a female, a male looking for intimacy, romance, and/or cybersex from another male may be acting upon conscious or unconscious homosexual feelings.    f.. Transsexuals (people who feel, psychologically, that they are the opposite sex rather than their given biological gender) and/or transvestites (people who cross-dress for sexual arousal or as an identification with females) may be drawn to virtual gender-switching. In rare cases, gender-switching could be a sign of what would be diagnosed as "genderconfusion" - i.e., a psychological disturbance where one's identity as a male or female has not fully developed.

  One reader of this article had this comment:

    I think I can sum up a factor about Genderhacking by repeating a line I saw someone type in a chatroom once: "Won't someone at least pretend to be female?" Lets face it, the majority of users of the internet are still male, and in such an ambiguous environment as the internet, the ability to lose one's inhibitions is quite strong. With a great many horny computer nerds out there, and no counterpart women on the net, I think some men pretend to be women - not because they have any desire to have sexual experiences with men themselves, but because they wish to perpetuate some form of cyber experience. It is as if they are an actor, manipulating the puppet of women (just as they might in their own mind, during a sexual fantasy) but in this case, they are sustaining the puppet for some other stranger at the end of another modem to play with. Once this cyberstory then exists, it doesn't really matter who wrote the woman's lines or who wrote the man's. For both can enjoy it from whatever perspective that they chose. Wanting, and trying, to switch gender is by no means a new social phenomenon. Theories in psychology abound on this topic. But the online version of gender-switching is unique and important for several reasons. First of all, cyberspace makes it so easy. It provides an attractive opportunity to experiment, abandon the experiment if necessary, and safely try again, if one so desires. More and different types of people are going to try it than in "real life." It also provides researchers with a unprecedented opportunity to study how and why people gender switch.  Unfortunately, the wide latitude for online gender-switching makes situations like those of Brad much more common. Even though exploring the anima and animus can be enriching, healthy, or just plain fun - hurtingother people is not an acceptable outcome. There is a very thin line between the right to experiment with one's gender and the violation of the rights of others by deliberately deceiving and manipulating them. At some point in an online relationship, in order to protect their feelings and even their "sanity," people sometimes find it necessary to test the companion to see if that person is faking gender. Some savvy internet users question their companions as as a kind of subtle, surreptitious detective work. Others immediately and rather presumptuously test the waters as soon as they meet someone who presents as the opposite sex