Thanks Ral - I'm glad to hear that (and very interested to hear your experiences in neuroscience). I suppose for me, it's the feeling that some people believe that if you have non gender-typical interests and behaviour patterns (I am about as far as the "Venus" stereotype in that dreadful book that you can imagine - possibly one reason why I so enjoyed reading Deborah Cameron's "The Myth of Mars and Venus") there is something wrong with you - you're not a proper woman, or you should have been a man, or something. Fortunately, these people are in a minority, but it still hurts.
And I really wish Simon Baron Cohen had labelled his two different brain types "systematising" and "empathising" rather than "male" and "female". I don't have a "male" brain, I have my brain, which happens to be one that is good at systematising (though actually I'm pretty good at relating to people too), and I am quite comfortable with the fact that I am a woman. (Which is not to detract from his very good work, and support of people like Gary McKinnon.) I suppose it's the mistake a lot of scientists make - they easily forget that words like "normal" and "typical" which they mean in a statistical sense have overtones of "normative" and "how things ought to be" to the lay person. (I am a research scientist in a politically contentious field - and my god, we worry loads about language and how it might be misinterpreted by the press and bloggers and politicians, because we have to, which I think makes me really sit up and notice when other scientists say things without realising how much scope their words have to be misinterpreted).