The demographic that is most likely to gender-bend is not male teenagers, but men over the age of 25. There are several ways one could explain this. One explanation is that male players are probably more tempted to gender-bend because restrictions on crossing gender boundaries are far more stringent for men in real life than for women. And younger male players are probably less secure about their own gender identity to gender-bend.
But of every male and female character you run into in game, how many are actually being played by someone of the opposite gender?
We know that about 19% of EQ players are female (n = 1239). So in a hypothetical pool of 1000 EQ players, 810 are male and 190 are female.
We know that about 15.0% of male EQ players and 4.2% of female EQ players use a character of the opposite gender as their main character (n = 1228). Thus, in our hypothetical pool of players:
Of the 810 male players, 689 are playing a male character while 121 are playing a female character.
Of the 190 female players, 182 are playing a female character while 8 are playing a male character.
So altogether:
There are 697 male characters, of which 8 (1%) are being played by a female player.
There are 303 female characters, of which 121 (40%) are being played by a male player.
So in EQ, every 1 out of 2 or 3 female characters is being played by a male player, while every 1 out of 100 male characters is being played by a female player.
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