Seems like a fine community to post in, if you consider your self woman-identified. (See sidebar.)

Obviously, it’s wrong to gatekeep ways people talk. That idiot should shut up – you can talk however you like. But I’ll answer the question you asked – “what the fuck does that even mean?”

From a linguistic perspective, there is a notion of masculine and feminine speech patterns – that is, phrases or words that are most frequently used by women and phrases that are most frequently used by men. In languages other than English, this is often easy to spot – for instance, in japanese, there are pseudo-gendered first-person pronouns. Similarly, “umai” (tasty) is often considered more masculine than “oishii” (tasty). In English though, it’s much less common. I could think of “honey” or “dear” – e.g. “ohh, honey, no!” or “hello my dear” are rather feminine phrases – in my life, I have mostly heard women use those words in that way, and when men use them they tend to be considered “effeminate.” It’s also apparently more common for men to say “uh” and for women to say “um.”

There are probably subtle differences in how often various phrases are used by men vs women if you were to carefully make a tally – but honestly why bother. That’s just descriptivism. To say that men and women should speak in different ways is prescriptivist, and just plain wrong. So I wouldn’t worry about the way you speak – if somebody is upset with that, it is that person who is wrong, not you. As someone whose partner is a tomboy/butch woman, I must say I wouldn’t expect her to switch to using more feminine speech patterns.

If it’s concerning to you anyway, something you can keep in mind is the well-known linguistic phenomenon that new ways of speaking tend to flow from women to men more than vice versa. This is true in every culture studied so far as I know. For instance, it used to be considered an exceptionally feminine thing to say “like” all the time “he was like, …” “that’s so, like, …” but now it’s pretty ubiquitous. So if your speech doesn’t sound feminine today, it might have sounded overtly feminine just 25 years ago.

There is a pseudo-scientific bullshit theory (that even has software tools available for it!) that purports that women and men communicate differently and thus can be identified by their writing style.

Masculine: Common stereotypes suggest that “masculine” writing is direct, assertive, action-focused, and uses more articles and concrete nouns.

Feminine: “Feminine” writing is said to be more personal, relational, emotional, and uses more pronouns and social words.

These ideas have deep roots in Western linguistic and literary criticism. Early 20th-century linguists like Otto Jespersen claimed women’s writing was less logical or innovative. Later studies found some statistical differences (sentence length, pronoun use), but these are small and often over-interpreted.

Basically it’s sexist, non-scientific bullshit based on the typical problems of social “science” studies: too-small sample sets, often within a single culture and, indeed, a very specific small sub-culture (to wit: middle-class white American university students). Real studies by competent practitioners note that people can write in different voices depending on context, and that most “gendered” writing is cultural performance and conformance to norms around them. The notion of writing “like a woman” or “like a man” is mostly just a product of cultural stereotypes (and I’d go so far as to say white supremacist stereotypes) and, historically, pseudo-scientific thinking, all rooted in Western (or more specifically American) norms. While some statistical linguistic differences do actually exist, they are minor, context-dependent, and not inherently tied to gender.

The proper conclusion the data supports is that writing style is flexible, shaped by audience, purpose, and social context-not by biology or any essential “masculine” or “feminine” essence.