Howard Rheingold’s scientific contributions

... Turkle explored various case studies of men who would even play with their gender in these online spaces, such as the user "Case," who played as multiple different women, which Turkle saw as an "experimentation" with a multiple and fluid "self" [58]. Similarly, in Howard Rheingold's early observations on the online community known as "The WELL," he described users such as "Joan," who identified as a disabled woman online, but "who in real life, IRL, was neither disabled, disfigured, mute, nor female" [46]. Though this sort of identity play might have come at the cost of deception, he noted that this technology "dissolved boundaries of identity," in alignment with Turkle's claim that "a more fluid sense of self allows for a greater capacity for acknowledging diversity." ...

Reference:

Facing Identity: The Formation and Performance of Identity via Face-Based Artificial Intelligence Technologies