#re the last post

I will say there are absolutely a lot of valid critiques there, but I think there is also something to be said for the left hand of darkness as an exercise (particularly to the modern reader) in pronouns not matching gender in a tidy way & the idea that the innate self isn’t necessarily tied to presentation. it is interesting to me how many people I come across saying they were unable to read the gethenians as genderfluid purely because they used he/him pronouns, which I think sort of falls into the same sort of trap that the book is pushing back against, where you have to overcome your own assumptions about how behaviors and presentations are gendered in order to come to a true understanding of the person. which is not to say there aren’t very real reasons for discomfort (particularly with regards to the choice of he/him in the 60s), just that maybe some discomforts deserve to be examined, particularly if you as a reader can only believe or understand genderfluidity if it’s presented through a set of pronouns you find comfortable