Did You Just Assume My Gender?

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About

"Did You Just Assume My Gender?" is a punchline used to mock the sensitivity of feminists, Social Justice Warriors, and the discussions going on in the LGBTQ community, particularly the Trans and Queer communities, involving gender identification.

Origin

In online discussions, a vocal community of people who identified as genderqueer^[1] or genderfluid (neither a boy or girl) grew on Tumblr and certain subreddits as part of Social Justice Blogging and increased awareness surrounding gender issues. "Did You Just Assume My Gender?" first appeared as a punchline mocking the supposedly militant nature of feminists and queer activists in a May 1st, 2016 post on Imgur by JCMorrowx.^[2]

Spread

"Did You Just Assume My Gender?" soon became a punchline associated with Triggered ^[3] memes and social justice warriors. On May 29th, 2016, a thread on Reddit's /r/OutofTheLoop^[4] asked "What's with people and their gender identities lately?" The top comment read:

"The gist of it is that once transgender people started to become more socially acceptable, it suddenly became cool (on tumblr at least) to pretend you were transgender or at the very least not bound to just one gender. As a result, certain people started to state the pronouns they wished to be assigned to them (i.e.ce/cir/cirs/cirself instead of he/him/his/himself) and lead to people complaining about being refered to as male or female."

Over the course of the summer, "Did You Just Assume My Gender?" jokes trended on 9gag^[4] and ifunny.^[5] Another thread on /r/OutOfTheLoop appeared on August 24th, this time asking "Where did Did you just assume my gender? come from?"^[6]

Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter Controversy

On August 20th, 2018, Twitter user @rysteez replied to a tweet posted by the official Twitter feed for the upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 with the message "I want more guys," to which the @CyberpunkGam^[7]e feed responded "Did you just assume their gender?" (shown below).

Following the tweet, several Twitter users accused the @CyberpunkGame feed of using a transphobic joke, while others argued the joke was not transphobic (shown below).

On August 21st, the @CyberpunkGame^[8] feed posted an apology for the tweet, stating that "harming anyone was never our intention" (shown below).