The farther you get from personal chat rooms, though, the less attention to gender there is. There certainly are parts of the Internet that allow for gender anonymity or for relatively ungendered encounters. E-mail, for instance, is a way to ask a question or make contact with another person without having to mark yourself as a man or woman. Also, message boards that are organized around a specific principle, like Noah's photography critique group, tend not to be nearly as gender-focused as the public chat rooms. Still, the original claims that the Internet would revolutionize our attitudes about gender have not really been actualized.
Gender identity remains a troubling issue, just as it still is in the real world.
He is saying that by acting the gender, you become it. Partly, I agree with this. Gender is a performance in the real world just as much as it is on the Internet. There is, in fact, a very complex range of gender codes that everyone uses and manipulates to some degree in the construction of gender. On the Internet, there is also a set of codes, often overlapping with the real world, which people employ and enact when gendering themselves.