http://www.english.uiuc.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm

(The examples from the ’70s are the most entertaining)

And I say it’s high time that the language mavens of English hand down a non-gender specific human pronoun.

It just makes citation an annoying matter of “his/hers” and “he/she.” Pollutes my writing, frankly, though I guess I understand why that matters less to the blogger than his/her total anonymity. (Probably just gonna start using “its” hereon. As in “its total anonymity.”)

(I mean, I realize revealing gender eliminates somewhere around half the world from our worldwide (wo)manhunt but I’m pretty sure that still leaves a few dozen candidates to sort through.)

Re: mystery,

I reckon being 6’7” and young-looking enough to pass for a peer has me well-stocked with mystery from “hello.” If I didn’t have both of those going for me (and here’s hoping I soon won’t) I guess I’d carefully deploy whatever else I had.

I let ’em believe I do anything else at night beside go to a coffee shop and plan the next day’s lesson. When they ask me if I have a girlfriend, I tell ’em, “One girlfriend? Oh no.” I dunno if everyone’s got a Guinness World Record or a hip-hop music video to dangle in front of her kids, but everyone’s got something interesting to withhold.

Why, why, why is it important that the blogger disclose gender? I’d say if it makes a difference for how the blog is read, that could be all the more reason not to reveal it.

As for the question about how much to tell the students, I don’t know: you have to let them know something in order for them to guess that there is anything worth chasing or any element of mystery there. How much time did it take your students to find out that you were not that easy to pigeonhole, that they had not actually figured you out?