Girl + Computer = ?

One of the first meetings of my automata theory classes, my professor made a weird gender reference. This is the actually second time this has happened during my college career.

Without getting too math-y on you, we were discussing set theory - imagine Venn diagrams with numbers from mathematical functions in them. As an example of two separate sets that wouldn’t overlap, he used “girls” and “boys.” He awkwardly mumbled that they wouldn’t overlap, except for hermaphrodites.

What?? Okay, so I may not be the queerest of the queer, but I still thought that concept was extremely incorrect, and sort of offensive! I feel like in today’s world it is incredibly obvious that things aren’t just heterosexual male and heterosexual female. There’s so much gray area.

However, at least he uncomfortably waved his hands to the class and said “hey, we’re computer geeks, we don’t know social stuff!”

You got that right, mister. But is that even an appropriate excuse? Claiming ignorance for something doesn’t mean you can opt-out of social awareness. If you say something rude about a certain race but say you just “don’t know about it,” people are still gonna call your ass racist.
So why can that still fly with gender?

When stuff like that happens, I just can’t help but wonder about that person who happens to be in these classes who doesn’t fit in with the norm, who now suddenly feels totally isolated and invisible.
I am privileged to be a mostly femme cis-gendered girl - this means I am lucky enough to fit into pretty much every expectation for women today except for my short hair and apparently odd career interests.
I am just one of a bunch of people in my department. Chances are, at least one person isn’t so lucky, and they deserve a safe space free of judgement or misrepresentation just like all the people like me. Although it sucks that people need to rely on others to foster a safe space for them, I think at the very least professors should be sensitive to this type of thing.

Thoughts?