(Checks. It's been a while since I read it.)

"I have already had some trouble trying to tell this story in a language that has no somer pronouns, only gendered pronouns. In their last years of kemmer, as the hormone balance changes, most people mostly go into kemmer as men. Dory's kemmers had been male for over a year, so I'll call Dory 'he,' although of course the point was that he would never be either he or she again."

Le Guin mostly avoids pronouns. The narrative is told in first person, by someone who hasn't yet gone into kemmer. I remember reading it a couple of decades ago, waiting breathlessly to find out what gender the narrator really was, and thus totally missing the point of the story. But I did grasp by the end - because Le Guin was very good at establishing this point - that our concept of what makes someone male or female is socially constructed, based on what activities we associate with each gender.

I think that, at this point in the day, what I most see missing from the story (unless I missed it in my quick skimming just now) is the concept of gender as a spectrum.