Tuesday, December 2, 2008

We Know Who You Are!

By Raelene Gorlinsky

Thank you to everyone who took the time to respond to our poll about our blog viewers. You can see the results in the right column. We found them quite interesting.

Writers who read our blog are about evenly split between published and unpublished authors—we’d truly had no idea how that would break down. There’s a nice sprinkling of “publishing professionals” (editors, agents, etc). And it’s great to see that people read a variety of genres; we don’t feel our ramblings are only applicable to the romance genre. Hey, we’ve even got some male participants (about 4%); we appreciate their perspective.

Of course, most interesting of all is that apparently 16 respondents had no sex. Uh, wait…that didn’t come out right. What I meant was, 7% of respondents did not select a gender. Now, this could be because you are shy, or perhaps didn’t feel it was a relevant question. But I lean more toward the explanation that we have some paranormal or alien participants (given the popularity of those genres right now) who just don’t comfortably fit into the “male” or “female” categories.

3 comments:

Angelia Sparrow said...

There are tens of thousands of normal humans who don't fit comfortably into a sexual binary. One of my friends had person with no bio sex whatsover in her college classes. (Genetically XO)

Intersexed and genderqueer people do actually exist (not just as aliens or paranormals) and the options of "male" and "female" are simply inadequate. (I've heard a few rants on the subject on various blogs)

I realize it was a joke. But I wanted to point out that "other" and "myob" are perfectly legitimate options for the next sex question.

Unknown said...

Angelia makes a good point. I have a friend who was born male but is in the process of transitioning into a female. She has spent thousands of dollars to be who she believes in her soul she is. I told her a few days ago she makes a better woman than she did a man because at least now she asks for directions. :)

Unknown said...

Er, yeah, I was going to say "way to be respectful of trans individuals, genderqueers, and other non-binarily gendered folks" but some other people did it for me.

I am sure the comment was made as a joke, but being a punchline gets old very quickly, trust me.