I know gender is a construct, and all. I even put my pronouns (he, him, his) on my work email signature. I haven’t bothered on my personal email account since so few people email me that the effort seems superfluous. But I’m wondering if the tech gods, aka AI, understand. You see, with more and more autosuggests (which really miss the point much of the time), at work the Microsoft Outlook email system is all the time trying to fill things in for me. Lately Al, which I call Al, has been trying to get me to sign my name with an “@“ so people can “text” me a response. No. No, no, no! I write emails like letters; greeting, body, closing. People who email like they’re texting sound constantly disgruntled and surly. Take an extra second and ask “How are you?” Was that so hard? But I was talking about gender.
So Al is busy putting words in my fingers and every time I start typing my closing name it autosuggests “Stephanie” before I correct it. It’s starting to make me a little paranoid. It does seem that men and women differ biologically, and I identify with the gender assigned to me at birth. I’m pretty sure Dr. Butter said “It’s a boy,” or something similar all those years ago. Now I’m not sure if Al is deliberately taunting me or simply going through the alphabet as I type. Stephanie comes before Stephen (which isn’t my name either) or Steve. The thing is, I type fairly fast (I won’t say accurately, but fast) and Al has trouble keeping up. But still Al is autosuggesting Stephanie for me every time. I’ve been using computers since the 1980s; shouldn’t Al know who I am by now?
Of course, when Al takes over such human things as gender will only get in the way. I guess we have that to look forward to. Gender may be something socialized, I realize. For those of us approaching ancient, we had gender differences drilled into our heads growing up. I recently saw one of those cutesy novelty signs that resonated with me: “Please be patient with me, I’m from the 1900s.” I’m not a sexist—I have supported feminism for as long as I can remember. But I don’t like being called Stephanie. What if my name was Stefan? That isn’t autosuggested at all. I know of others whose names are even earlier, alphabetically. Maybe Al is overreaching. Maybe it ought to leave names to humans. At least for as long as we’re still here.
