Insulting as a child, but with hindsight funny

A few days ago, without seeing it in the post, I saw that my mother had found a letter to me from Front Porch Republic:

It amazed me that the writers mistook me for a woman with “Dear Ms. Benney”!

As a boy, I was often called a “girl” and many children at PEGS said loudly “Julien’s sex is a female” and that insulted me enough that I said “My sex is a male”/“My sex is a male” and the teasing boy replied “fe” when I said it. I felt that whoever was teasing me really needed severe punishment so they would never, ever think of doing it again; however none of my schools did a thing to stop kids teasing me, to the point that I felt physical fighting was the only way I could hurt them enough, although I knew myself as much weaker than the bullies.

With age, I feel as though it’s not nearly so insulting to be called a female as it seemed in the manly world of Bush Senior Era youth, brought up on bands like AC/DC or Guns’n’Roses who (implicitly) had an ideal of a world without women. This world, which approximates what the masses in the Enriched World want today, clearly is not sustainable given the large government debts universal in Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand and the absence of natural resources with which to pay for them. Being depicted as feminine and soft is in that sense inherently countercultural in the Enriched World, and for this reason I have not responded to what Front Porch Republic did as I would have in school.