Not unfair, but not exactly enlightening. Can you come up with some examples of characters you've seen that triggered this response, and others that didn't?
I don't think so. I've never been in a situation with a man playing a woman where the roleplaying
didn't creep me out.
BTW, I keep harping on the subjectivity thing, because I think it's the only truly good argument for my position, and I'm not going back on that except to tell a brief story:
I used to be heavily into MUDding. (For you kids, MUDs were Wow without any graphics. Yes, that's right ... no graphics. At all. Now shut up and get off my lawn.) As a MUDder, I interacted with scores of characters, mostly male and some female. Some of the female characters' "roleplaying" (roleplaying on a MUD, like roleplaying in WoW, was the exception, not the norm, thus the quotes) creeped me out or offended me, and some didn't.
Eventually I became an administrator of a couple of MUDs, with access to player information (for legitimate reasons, including social ones). With no exceptions that I can recall -- admittedly it was 20 years ago -- the players of the creepy or offensive female characters were dudes, and the players of the non-creepy, non-offensive female characters were not. I was able to, using the "creepy or offensive" test, identify dudes-playing-chicks with no objective knowledge of their actual gender.
Yeah, yeah. Here's the punchline: I was playing a female character. (I'd been given a higher-level female character and found that chicks got in-game help from guys. So I creepily and offensively pretended to be a chick. The second punchline? Aside from claiming to be a Real Live Gurl, I behaved 100 percent like myself. Nerds online, then as now, really, really like a girl (or "girl") who's into cyberpunk, D&D, and comic books.)
The reason I ask is that I don't see a lot of difference between playing a male or a female character. [...] I play them pretty much the same.
Given that, why not play your own gender,
even if only to avoid the "he -- wait, she -- wait, are you female?" issue?