Lois Strachan asked Leanne Hunt:

I’ve just finished reading What Every Blind Person Needs You to Know and was curious about the fact that you always refer to the blind family member, friend or colleague as “she”. This seems to imply that the process outlined in your book is aimed only at helping blind women – is that the case?

Leanne Hunt Thanks for asking, Lois. This was a decision I took early on in the writing for technical reasons. When discussing relationships, as I do on every page of this book, it's easy to confuse the reader with regard to who you are talking about. I chose to use the female pronoun to refer to the blind person because I included a fair amount of autobiographical material and felt I could speak with more authority that way. However, I can see that it could be taken to infer that visually-impaired people are all female, or that the book only targets companions of female visually-impaired people. English can be very discriminatory that way, but I hope it doesn't detract from the main message of the book, which is that vision loss is not synonymous with loss of intelligence, potential for growth, or creativity.

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