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Jiro comments on Open thread, Jul. 04 - Jul. 10, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Or, you know, find other gender-related things to not accept. When I was looking for a copper rod (to cut into some pieces for electron microscopy), the sellers looked at me like I was weird or something. Later, the guy who cut it for me didn't want my money on account of me being female (but I threw it at him and escaped). And before that, the lady in the pawnshop where I tried to pawn it to get some urgently needed money to commute to work, was completely thrown (I guess they didn't want copper much). All of these occasions were rather outside my comfort zone, but I do not see why I should not have done it.
Presumably you were buying a copper rod because you needed a copper rod, and you had no choice but to be gender-noncomformant if you wanted one. It's not as if you had an option to pick gender conformant scientific equipment and non gender conformant scientific equipment and deliberately picked the noncomformant one.
Also, there's a difference between being considered unusual and being considered socially weird.Last time I ran into someone riding a horse on a city street I'm pretty sure I stared at him for a while--but that was because you don't see many of those, not because I thought that someone who rode a horse in the 21st century was violating a taboo.
Ah, but the gender-conformant thing in the Department where I was a student would be to have a man buy a copper rod. Which seemed to be the understanding of all those people. One of which offered to buy me coffee. But he was drunk, so there's that.
Generally, yes, I think it best to just disregard gender-conformity, but in a non-obvious way (for example, many women have backpacks, and many women do think handbags more feminine, and I have been advised to have a handbag, but nobody really would go to the trouble of making me do it. I had thought that small task would be just as neutral.)