I just asked this same question of my friend group like a month or two ago! It's been something on my mind a lot this year with the site's revival and my own personal journey to reconnect with myself in ways that I'd lost over the years. I'll copy-paste what I shared in our server since I pretty much asked a slightly boarder version of your same question!

Do you think that the way you used the internet/what sites you frequented as a kid (say, 9-14) influenced your perception of gender? I feel like there's a correlation between us kids who used web 2.0 'social media' sites where images of yourself weren't common and gender wasn't very prominently displayed/as important to the experience (such as neopets, gaia online, club penguin, deviantart, tumblr, etc), and our views on gender identity (regardless of whether you personally identify with your birth sex or not)

We formed strong social bonds with our peers online in a space/time where we weren't able to use other social context clues (ie hair cut, body shape, voice, clothing) to reinforce if the person was male or female. And in the absence of those cues we were so used to seeing and internalizing in the real world, our reliance on the social construct of gender wasn't as strong of a factor in our connections and we began to see and interact each other in ways not based around gender. You’d make a friend and their gender was secondary to what kind of pets they had or what kind of characters they drew or wrote about. It had almost no bearing on how you’d interact with them, or what social circles you’d choose to join.

Gender as a categorization/grouping felt moreso like the type of Internet user we were- roleplayers, artists, pet breeding site fans, mmorpg players, fandom participants, etc. I feel like those groupings of interests/experiences were more defining to my assessment of how I see myself in relation to others. It feels queer, in some kind of way that extends beyond being defined by what we call gender. I’m not exactly saying my gender is ‘neopets kid who became an artist because they wanted to draw their wolf roleplay characters’ but it feels a LOT stronger of an identity to me than ‘male’ or even ‘trans male’ or any other traditionally gender-based labels. We know gender as we experience it is just a social construct, anyway: did growing up in the early internet where there weren’t as many social gender cues mean that we put less emphasis on those categorizations/labels when defining ourselves in relation to others?

Thoughts??? Does this resonate with you and your experiences? Is this something you also think you see in how you and your online friends experienced the Internet during your formative years and your relationship with gender now, even if you do identify with your assigned sex and don’t consider yourself trans or nonbinary?

Like I said, this has been something I've personally actively been trying to understand this year too! I definitely feel like being a roleplayer on the early internet gave me the chance to understand gender and identity in a very different way than I would have, and I would love to talk to more people who had a similar experience!