In the early days of the internet when everyone used BBSs and had handles, I was the Iron Orchid. She was a character in a Michael Moorcock series I had just read and the only one of the characters at the end of time to actually give birth from her body. I was the only one of my friends who had a kid at that point and I couldn’t think of anything else that suited me.  

One evening there was a conversation about the war with Iraq and, pacifist that I am, I responded to some idiot that those soldiers were not actually fight for my freedom.  There was a little more to that small skirmish of words, but, you get the idea. The idiot said something snarky about me being perfectly willing to reap the benefits of the sacrifices made by those soldiers and another user stepped in to back me up and used masculine pronouns.  Which I thought was funny.

My response included my feminine pronouns.  My (sort of) friend said “oops, sorry” and moved on in the conversation. The idiot got angry because I had been posing as a man.  Iron, it seems, is a masculine substance and orchids are masculine flowers since the root of “orchid” is the Greek word for testicles.

I could almost hear him grinding his teeth when I asked how he felt about Steel Magnolias.