She wrote her thesis more than 4 years ago, and things might be different now. And even within the whole community of Internet users, I guess there are significant differences in affluence, as Internet access is not as expensive as it was 4 years ago. Furthermore, I guess that the female part of Internet users is growing fast. However, a main issue is male-female cross gendering. Females get special privileges, and female-presenting players take advantage of this favoritism and chivalry.
Many people just feel very uncomfortable when interacting with others whose gender is unclear.
However, the subversion of gender is not always something positive, and it requires a great deal of cultural and psychological flexibility. The author explains that virtual sex is the most expressive of all virtual interactions. Players can become involved in the virtual actions of their characters, and the line between virtual action and actual desires can become blurred. The process of textually coding gesture, appearance, and proclivity on one side, and the uncompressing of these signs, sometimes as simple as emoticons, into a complex and dense image on the other side, requires a lot of fantasy and empathetic understanding of cultural symbols and individual symbolic tokens. I can't say anything about that, because I just lack the experience of MUDsex, but Reid seems to be very excited about the possibilities and outcome of virtual sex.