No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition...

...or a female tank.  I've debated whether I should have been a female dwarf instead of human.  I don't know if that would somehow lessen the blow or make peoples' heads explode.

Gimli: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. 

Aragorn: [whispering] It's the beards. 

Gimli: And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no dwarf women, and that dwarves just spring out of holes in the ground! 

Eowyn: [laughs] 

Gimli: Which is, of course, ridiculous.

Full disclosure: I have no beard.

It can be pretty funny to listen, and even watch, peoples' reactions the first time they hear you on Ventrilo.  Especially when you're usually paired up with your healer spouse.  They assume that my husband's me, and vice-versa, till one of us IDs ourselves over Vent.

The other day, we were in a department store picking up a gift for someone and the clerk noticed my husband's priest t-shirt.  So he starts chatting him up about the game, not paying more than a clerk's usual level of courtesy to me as we finished the transaction.  I smiled at my husband and said fondly, "yep, he's my healer." Took the clerk a couple seconds to realize it, but he quite literally did a double-take and said "wait, you're a...a tank?"  I just smiled sweetly.  "That's...wow, yeah, that's a role reversal," he stammered.

It's interesting to see people make judgements about others' personalities based on the classes they choose.  It's also interesting to see people use a very limited list of personality traits when thinking about certain classes.  Maybe people think of tanking in terms of its bloodthirst and recklessness.  Maybe people associate it with being a glutton for punishment with no fear of getting hurt.  Maybe people associate it with leadership, or protectiveness.  They probably recognize the challenge it presents to players' reaction times, their ability to anticipate and head off problems, and their situational awareness.  And maybe people don't think of those traits as being very feminine.  Not that they're directly trying to be judgmental, or chauvinistic, or condescending.  There's just something about tanking that doesn't strike people as appealing to women.

I have a priest, and in TBC she was definitely a healer.  I liked the "mission critical" aspect of healing, as well as the challenge of good situational awareness, reaction time, and anticipation in a certain kinship with the way I feel about tanking.  I'm not sure where she'll end up (I love the synergy in the shadow tree) but I'm looking forward to dual specs more for my priest than my tank.

My point is there are things that attract me to being a healer too.  But not the way that tanking is attractive to me.  I've healed alongside my husband, and have found that people accept me as a healer almost as a matter of course, and they don't accept my husband as a healer any differently than me.  The only time he gets strange reactions is when people find out he's the healer and I'm the tank.

If someone's surprised about a female player choosing to be a tank, maybe they need to examine better what the classes in WoW have to offer people, and appreciate that in a game this big, a lot of people have different definitions of fun.  Maybe some of the traits of that class are more feminine than you might have previously thought.  Maybe some of the traits are more masculine than you thought, too.  Maybe your female tank has different reasons from a guy for enjoying the class.  Maybe it's not a gender thing, but rather an individual thing.  Much as it can be funny to see or hear a visceral reaction of surprise when they see a girl wearing a warrior t-shirt or hear a female voice announcing "Last Stand" over Vent, I'd much prefer that we reach the point where folks are as unsurprised to hear a female tank over Vent as they are a male healer.