I feel like there's so much hypermasculinity in the video game industry, that it's been normalized, and people have started seeing masculine characters as androgynous, and androgynous characters as women or girls.
Characters don't have to be exaggeratedly masculine in order to be masculine.
I remember reading a blog one time by a genderqueer transfeminist, saying that they had a hard time presenting in an androgynous fashion because their body type was perceived as feminine. And that they felt that men had an easier time being seen as androgynous than women, because men were treated as the default and women the other in society.
I don't know how true that is, and I can't speak from their experience, because I wasn't someone raised as female but identifying as genderqueer and trying to present in an androgynous fashion. And having a hard time.
But when a lot of people call androgynous characters, or kind of feminine male characters or other characters kind of like that, particularly ones in Japanese video games, as women or girls or female. It kind of reminds me of that.
It does seem like people are very quick to question the gender of a character who isn't stereotypically masculine.
