We're here. We're female. Get used to it.

But you haven't, have you?

Why do gamers have a preconcieved notion of who the gaming nation is? And why are so many of us refusing to accept the truth when those assumptions are proven wrong?

And, most importantly, why won't you let the women and girls in the clubhouse when keeping us out only hurts gaming?

It wasn't so long ago that gamers were a veiled, underground society without constructive ties to one another. We were loners who only made person-to-person connections when standing in line for the latest console or when chatting up the clerk at GameStop.

Back then, when games and consoles didn't connect gamer-to-gamer, these limited encounters allowed us the only opportunity to participate in a human being's most popular pasttime: making judgments.

It's human nature to make snap assumptions based on surface classifications. White. Black. Rich. Poor. White collar. Blue collar. It's not fair, but it's the nature of us. We see people and we can't help but make inferences about who they are based on what they look like because it's easy.

Making assumptions about the nature of gamers was indeed easy when games were about inserting a disk into your XBox or PS2 and playing all night because there was no interaction with other players. We were nameless, faceless and sexless. We were all the same, without form or physicality. And no one bothered to ask us who were are because everyone assumed it was a well-known fact.

For far too many years, gamers in general were misidentified. Just look at the media and advertising directed at us. We've been deluged with hot, busty elves in metal bikinis and scantily clad gun-toting chicks in cleavage-enhancing armor. The industry assumed we were all 15-year-old boys looking to score.

That changed with the MMOs and has been carried further by the XBox 360. All of a sudden, we evolved. We were connected. And with those connections came a realization that assumptions we had all made about the gaming community were completely wrong. People started asking each other questions the industry hadn't. "Where you from?" "What do you do for a living?" "How old are you?"

But what happens when the answers buck long-held assumptions we've all made about what's "normal"?

You either rework your assumptions or you try desperately to ignore the answers because you don't like them.

The experience of being a female gamer mirrors just such an an evolution.

When women log into a game, we are like the pre MMO-world. We are assumed to be "same as everyone else" and we are evaluated not by our physical makeup but by the content of our commentary and our ability to play.

Inevitably, there's an effort to get to know more about us. The interaction becomes like the post-MMO world. Other players can't help but find a hole in which to pigeon us and start asking questions. That leads to conversations that include the ubiquitous "irlGirl?" (in real life girl?) or "a/s/l?" (age/sex/location).

In most cases, for a girl gamer, smart players reevaluate their assumptions about who they thought we were, acknowledge the reality of the situation, and move on under the new, accurate reality. Smart players take changing facts in stride.

But others choose to hold on to old premises, with infuriating results.

For far too many boy gamers, a girl player who reveals herself as female -- or worse yet, a grown woman -- is instantly "less than." Frequently we're seen as "weirdos" or, worse, "not real" players. Conversations change because "there's a lady in the room."

There's an upside and a downside to revealing your true self to other gamers. Sure, we have to put up with the occasional nitwit who treats us differently. But on the plus side, when we are willing to expose ourselves, the game-playing community gains variety. We female players help to relieve the monotonous sameness with the game-playing community at large -- a faceless, raceless, genderless collective that assumes we are all the same.

Back in the old days of ignorant bliss for the industry, assuming we were all pre-teen boys was easy to do because we were faceless and genderless. It was a forgone conclusion we were all the same.

But as we are connecting to each other in more intimate ways, via MMO chat and voice apps like Teamspeak, the industry seems only beginning to understand that we aren't all the same. We have lost the safety and egalitarian nature our anonymity, which is sad, but we've gained identity -- a true identity that includes our differences as well as our similarities.

But this throws a spanner of the works for the gaming industry, doesn't it? It's much easier to market games and advertising to a demographic when you assume that your audience is all one kind of person. Rather than do the difficult, complicated and sometimes uncomfortable work of reassessing assumptions and taking into account our differences, the industry has held fast to its course of the teenage-boy stereotype. As if it ignores the differences, maybe they'll go away.

You'd think that, with all the exposure of our true selves in recent years -- not just female, but older people and gamers from other countries -- we'd be gaining a greater sense of the gaming nation -- our ages, our genders, our professions, our races, our accents and our nationalities. Once the vanilla veil on gaming is lifted, you'd think that we would all grab each other, glory in our variety, and sing "kumba-ya."

But we haven't. In fact, as more questions are being answered about the nature of the average gamer, more exclusion seems to be bubbling up like dinosaur bones from the La Brea tarpits.

It came screaming up at me the other day when the BBC -- an organization without a pro-gaming agenda -- released the results of its own study of who games in the United Kingdom. It found that of the 26.5 million players in the UK, adults age 36 to 50 were the largest demographic -- 6.5 million people. It also determined that 45 percent of the 26.5 million people in the UK who play games are female.

This almost identically mirrors a 2005 study by the Electronic Software Association that found the average U.S. gamer is age 30 and 43 percent are female. Women over the age of 18, in fact, represent a GREATER portion of the U.S. game-playing population than boys age 6 to 17.

When this most recent study came to light, I'd expected that, despite the industry's refusal to accept our presence, gamers themselves might open their arms and say, "Isn't it great that women are finally getting recognized for their significant contribution to the market." Or at least a hearty "woot!"

Quite the opposite. Let me point to a few of my favorite quotes from gaming sites:

"While male gamers outnumber females in every age group -- the ratio ranges from 44:56 to 48:52 -- this seems counter-intuitively high, despite attempts by various groups to make the female gamer more prominent as a consumer." - Joystiq

"I say 'BS' on the female gamer thing. Maybe they are talking about board games. Of all the girls I know maybe 1 or 2 of them play video games. Even then, they don't play much at all." - blog commenter on study results

Rather than accepting the numbers, there's been a near complete and utter denial that they're are right. They can't POSSIBLY be right. Everybody KNOWS girls don't play video games! The nicest thing a news source reporting on the study could muster was the heartwarming label of "counter-intuitive" and inferring that we aren't prominent consumers of games, when the numbers quite plainly state that we already are.

Now, I expect to get this kind of reception by the non-gaming world because it's usually out of touch with the gaming genre. And I'm pretty well used to being ingnored by the industry because it's been ignoring our existence for the last 20 years.

But it really strikes me that gamers themselves not only pretend female gamers don't exist but actively deny it in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Again, stay the course. Pretend those differences don't exist and maybe they'll disappear.

Why is this happening? Why are some of us so insistent that girls can't possibly be almost half of gamers, despite the results of multiple studies?

I think it's because much of the gaming nation is so in love with a false picture of the face of gaming that they will do anything they can to hold on to it -- including denying bald-faced facts. It's far too easy to work under prior assumptions than to reconsider them.

I see why they do it. Life for gamers and for the industry at large is so much easier when we're all the same. The industry doesn't have to rethink gaming and advertising, and a large segment of the young-boy gaming population likes the idea that gaming is a "guy" thing.

They both love the erroneous notion that gamers are "young" and "edgy" and "out there." They've both thrived for so may years under the assumption that they had their own radical, extreme, underground society that to find out women as old as their moms play games rips down the He-Man Women-Haters Clubhouse at its foundations.

The problem is, this denial of female gamers' existence has only hurt the industry, and it will continue to hurt gamers, too, until either women and adult gamers are considered part of the equation or our precious world of gaming is irrevocably changed or destroyed entirely.

Boy gamers need us, because without us the world sees the gaming nation as teenage boys. And there's few things on God's green earth that scares the monied and powerful elite more than young men in groups.

Insisting on identifying themselves with such classifications as "young" "edgy" "males" and then perpetuating it with marketing stereotypes only gives those who would harm the gaming industry ammunition by which they will attempt to destroy it. Letting adult women and older gamers into the clubhouse is the fastest and most assurredly successful way of shutting down the Jack Thompsons of this world because they will no longer be able to consider gaming a "young boys only" sport.

If the Hilary Clintons and Leland Yees of this world can no longer identify games as a primarily children's occupation that warps pliable minds and induces young men to violence, they are forced to see it as a viable adult entertanment source that appeals to a large and varied range of people. Without that foundation, restrictive and burdonsome legislation has little to stand on.

We cannot deny that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris don't represent gamers out of one side of our mouths and then deny the true face of gaming -- with its wrinkles and breasts -- out of the other.

As long as the industry and some gamers continue to deny the veracity of statistics that keep the critics of gaming at bay -- the ones who scream "Think about the children" -- and continue to identify the market as predominantly young and male, you're playing into the critics' hands. You allow the argument to continue on the critics' level.

And the critics will win, because they have more money, more access, more power and more fear-inducing rhetoric behind them.

It's up to us. Rather than allow the loss of our anonimity to become just another source of mysogyny and agism, we should be using it as a vehicle for freedom and respect. And it starts with leaving the safety of sameness and letting go of our own assumptions and preconcieved notions of who we are, even if it makes your world a little more complicated.

Let us into your clubhouse, boys, or you're going to die inside it alone.