Apparently I'm not a woman because I use Linux

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21 Jun, 2026

I can't stop thinking about this stupid interaction I had while playing an online game with strangers. For context, my username is very obviously feminine and I don't hide the fact that I'm a woman when talking to strangers. Somehow, in the chat, the topic of operating systems came up and I mentioned that I use Linux. This man proceeded to tell me that I must be a man because women don't use Linux. It might just about be the stupidest thing I ever heard. As if I'm only capable of thinking about makeup and sparkles and unicorns. Those computing machines are just too complicated for me to wrap my pretty little head around! I shouldn't let it get to me, but I work in a team of mostly female software engineers and we experience this kind of thing all the time. Even other women will claim that computers are for men, or that women's brains just aren't wired for it! I'm not going to pretend that the Linux world isn't overwhelmingly male-dominated. But to claim that I must be a man because I use Linux is just absurd1.

He didn't even consider the possibility that I could have been using Hannah Montana Linux!↩

#gender #linux #rant #tech