The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace Science Fiction)

In The Dispossessed the experiment is “What if a society evolved where nobody owned anything?” In The Left Hand of Darkness it is, “What if gender was not fixed but serially mutable?” For most of their twenty-six-day month & cycle, Gethenians are androgynous & celibate, but for two or three days of kemmer they become sexually active as either male or female, with no say in which. Any individual, then, can be both a mother & father, & can bear & sire children. (This physiology gives rise to the novel’s most memorable line, “The king was pregnant.”) 

Genly—like most of the book’s readers—possesses a single one unchanging gender, making him, from a Gethenian perspective, a biological anomaly to be pitied—or, less kindly, mistrusted as a “pervert.” True to the greatest science fiction, Gethen is the thumbprint whose thumb is our own world, and the gender fluidity of Gethenians poses questions for the Homo sapiens of Earth. Le Guin is unafraid to take her time examining these questions. 

Does violence have a gender? Rape does not exist on Gethen, & seduction “would have to be awfully well timed,” but what of marriage, sexism, misogyny, & feminism? Is gender at the core of the self, or is there a deep-down “Gethenian layer” where we, too, are neither male nor female? Is gender as immutable as most cultures on Earth still insist? Like a benign relative struggling with his own transphobia, Estraven struggles to understand Genly; & through