Is my name deceptive?

Who cares if people here on LessWrong are mistaken about your gender?

I thought you were female, so it's misleading in that sense. But I don't think it's a problem, use whatever name you like.

My parsing of it is "Katy Dee", which seems much more likely to be a nickname for a female (short name + initial) than any other option (Man named "Katy", parsing as "K.T.D." or "K @ ydee", etc.). I find it hard to believe that the name wasn't chosen with the knowledge that many users would take it as a female presentation.

So, misleading to me, at least. Not necessarily deceptive (and even if you did choose it with the expectation of misleading, it's not harmfully deceptive). Your gender doesn't matter very much here, so this particular confusion is pretty harmless.

Should you change it? Only if it bothers you. It probably affects how some people react to your posts - you'll get a different reaction on some topics, and probably a slightly different karma profile as a man than as a woman. That has good and bad elements to it, and it's your choice whether good outweighs bad.

Therefore, I pose the question to the community: is my current username deceptive or otherwise misleading,

I don't know about deceptive or misleading. It does sound a lot like a girl name.

and should I change it?

Change it to "Christine" if you wish. It's your image, construct it as you prefer.

Well it does mislead, but since it's not intentional and the misunderstanding isn't going to cause any harm, you have no real reason for changing it - unless you find it bothersome you to clarify when it happens to come up.

I don't particularly care, but I'm curious.

If you didn't intend your name to come out like that, what did you intend?

I interpreted your name as female, but I don't feel "deceived" to learn you aren't. I also thought user: Alicorn was a guy (just due to base rates, I guess), so my ability to interpret sex via text is clearly pretty weak..

What everyone else said. I originally read it as female. But it's hard to judge whether or not I would have read it as female normally, given that you specifically pointed us to ask if your name was deceptive.

On LW though, I don't think gender confuses your message at all. The class of person here is generally lightyears above the class that trolls the internet for girls. So if it and of itself doesn't bother you, don't change it. I wouldn't really want to take the almost 1200 point karma hit.

BTW, despite what my username might seem to suggest, I have nothing to do with the military.

I've seen you elsewhere on this site plenty of times, and I certainly thought you were female. If that's a problem, then you should probably change your username. If not, then keep it.

I wouldn't call it deception (because that implies that you're trying to trick us for some nefarious purpose), but I would certainly call it misleading.

"Deceptive" is a bit bloody presumptuous of them. Mind you, I used to use "bimbette" as an IRC nick and got a ridiculous selection of wannacybers. I'd definitely class this as a problem with them and not with you.

Call yourself what the hell you like. If you're worried about effects of the name on how your text is taken, change it to a small random bunch of letters and numbers or something.

No, it is not deceptive.

We're only capable of revealing a certain portion of ourselves. A full sharing of who we are would require more bandwidth than is available through modes of human communication. The portions you choose to reveal should be those which have the most impact in the context of what you're trying to accomplish. If you feel your gender is of import on LessWrong, then you should take effort to make it more evident. Personally, I feel that ideas are far more important here, and gender should be [mostly] ignored.

Eh, people think I'm german.

I think it's fine. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

(And if it matters to someone for any purpose, they can just ask you)

I naturally tend to assume that everyone on the Internet (or on discussion forums and comment threads, at least) is posting under a false identity of some sort. This troubles me not one bit. Am I the only one who does this, though ?

Are you going to be extensively writing on issues of sex/gender with frequent references to personal experience? No? Then why should anyone care if you're male or female?

In my view it would cause an average USian to think you are female but that only matters if you care to be mistaken for female. I wouldn't call it deceptive and to me people can choose any nickname they want for whatever reason as long as it's not overly crass/offensive/inane.

Though I'm not sure this warranted its own post, rather than say a comment in an open thread.

I think the "katy" led me to assume you were female, but I've mistaken a few other users' genders as well, with no real information on them other than their usernames.

I notice you don't have anything in the "Location" field of your user profile. Maybe insert a note there to the effect of "I'm a dude, btw"? (Being honest, I kinda doubt any large fraction of people who might make that mistake would notice, but it's something you could do.)

There's a small cost to the confusion caused by your name leading readers to assume (with hopefully low confidence) that you're female, and there's a small cost to the confusion and effort required to actually change your username and update references to the new username.

I'd say that "shut up and multiply" says that here, on LessWrong, the cost of the confusion is VASTLY less than the cost of the effort you'd have to go through to sign up for a new username and explain the situation. So, Utilitarianism says that you should keep your name for The Greater Good.

The key here is that it's not deceptive - you're not intentionally misleading people, nor are you allowing a harmful confusion to persist. You're doing nothing harmful or immoral, there's just a tiny bit of confusion.