In the Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin inserts a passage, a fictional essay about gender among the Gethens.
When I read The Left Hand of Darkness the first time, in a Junior High summer, I was deep in love with it, and when reading this passage in particular I thrilled in the virsimilitude of ephemeria-within-a-book, that I was sorting through the newspaper clippings of a future civilization, and when at the end of the essay the author is revealed to be female, I felt smugly, “I see what you did there! You used dry sciencey language so we would all assume this was a man speaking and then you overthrew our expectation!”
Now, re-reading this passage today, my reaction is quite different. I don’t for a second assume the writer is male. I am annoyed by the voice, and by the backwards things it says.
I don’t want to be female. I’d love it if my gender could be conveniently taken off, like a tiara, to be worn only when I wanted that type of attention.
I yearn for a future where we aren’t male or female first, where gender truly doesn’t matter.
Which brings me to Anne Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice” — and some of my best friends have maligned the work, saying the use of female pronouns by default is a “cheap gimick” or even that it “still has no female characters.”
I adore the gender confusion in Ancillary Justice. Because, by halfway through the first chapter I was in the mental space of “oh I really don’t care what gender anyone is, it’s too hard to figure out.”
YES.
Let me tell you about this research project on gendered names in old science fiction magazines… it’s exhausting! I thought I’d find some nice way to statistically mark a name as Male or Female… but I barely can. Sure, John is almost always male and Mary almost always female, but give me a hand here with Leslie and Sandy and Wei. Nictzin? Greye? Gender in one simple thing, name, changes over time, culture, ethnicity. It’s a squishy fluffy meh sorta thing.
What even is gender? Why do I care, beyond the annoying fact that people use how wide my pelvic girdle is to assume things about me that have nothing whatsoever to do with my hips. I don’t math with my hips.
But okay, for good or ill, I am a cis-het woman. I am totally into boys and I am comfortable with my body and I like to wear dresses. And yet…
See, I have also heard people complain that “Left Hand of Darkness” has no female characters. “What are you talking about? All the Gethen are female as often as male!”
“They don’t act female,” my friend said. “They’re men with female parts.”
Which reminded me of some rando complaining waaaaaaay back in the day that Ripley in Alien was “just a man with boobs.”
And you know what? THAT IS WHAT A WOMAN IS. A man with boobs. I am a man with boobs. Because men and women are PEOPLE I am a person before I am boobs. I am a man with boobs.
And I wish to Gort sometimes I could take ’em off.
by 
by 
