Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #15

"The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin. I found the first half really slow and dull, though it really picks up in the second when some more adventure-y bits kick in. The stifling social density of the beginning may be necessary to really sell the later developments, though. I'll hold off on a final judgment until I've finished.

This book is known as one of the first "dude gender lmao" sci-fi stories. It features a humanoid species that spends most of its time in a sexless state, and becomes male or female once a month when they go into heat (the same person may become either s*x). From this setup you might imagine the book takes a recognizably lib/train perspective that gender is fluid or that traditional categories are undesirable, but I actually find the story extremely biologically essentialist. Separate from the various cultures in the story, all the people of this species objectively differ from humans because of their general lack of s*x. And they handle sexuality differently (not better or worse) because biology makes it less influential most of the time and more influential once a month. The same person may be both a mother and a father at different times, which also seriously alters one's life experience. It's not possible to imagine that a biologically human society could adopt this species' perspective on s*x, or vice versa, because the cultures are built around objective biological realities.

I doubt that Le Guin's own cultural surroundings would let her be a TERF, but the story does a pretty good job of separating s*x from "gender." To the extent that this book raises a mirror towards our own culture, I think it's to examine the ways that simple animal biology may be responsible for things that seem to us as higher, more thoughtful, etc. It asks a question like "what would humanity be like if s*x worked differently?" and lets us ponder it. That can give us additional perspective, but it can't and shouldn't mean "s*x isn't real" or "gender is just an identity" when the whole point of the story is that these things matter.