It's posts like yours that make me realize that I was actually lucky to be born into a time and place filled with people who made assumptions about me (well, my intellectual capacity, mostly) based primarily on my ethnicity. Gender was in there some times, but it was a distant, distant second. I was able to grow up and move into adulthood with the view and mindset that my gender and the gender of those around me weren't particularly important. Society emphasizes gender and gender identification, but I believe that it's possible to leave gender out of considerations of a person's make-up on an individual level. If a person is so inclined, anyway.