Could be! I haven't read much of her writings - mainly her fantasy.
"My main problem with a lot of stories about gender is that everyone seems to assume that (much like sexuality) it's a spectrum that revolves around two poles (male and female, with some blending in the middle)."
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, a spectrum line is inadequate as an analogy of that sort of thing - though it was a highly progressive analogy in 1997, back when I realized I was nonbinary (a word that didn't yet exist in that definition). "Bigender," I called myself back then; it took a while for me to realize that this label wasn't really adequate.
(*Checks*.) Yes, "Karhide" was published in 1995. There wasn't even a nonbinary community at that point - and wouldn't be any sort of sizeable nonbinary community for another five years or so, I believe? Certainly none existed in 1997, when I went looking. So Le Guin may very well not have conceived of agenderness as a possibility. That she conceived of an ambisexual society in 1969 is remarkable enough!
"but it would be nice to have it understood that sometimes your own internal feeling of your own gender comes up with an error/not installed, and that's okay."
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Date: 2021-06-30 05:10 pm (UTC)From:"I wonder if that's a different story?"
Could be! I haven't read much of her writings - mainly her fantasy.
"My main problem with a lot of stories about gender is that everyone seems to assume that (much like sexuality) it's a spectrum that revolves around two poles (male and female, with some blending in the middle)."
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, a spectrum line is inadequate as an analogy of that sort of thing - though it was a highly progressive analogy in 1997, back when I realized I was nonbinary (a word that didn't yet exist in that definition). "Bigender," I called myself back then; it took a while for me to realize that this label wasn't really adequate.
(*Checks*.) Yes, "Karhide" was published in 1995. There wasn't even a nonbinary community at that point - and wouldn't be any sort of sizeable nonbinary community for another five years or so, I believe? Certainly none existed in 1997, when I went looking. So Le Guin may very well not have conceived of agenderness as a possibility. That she conceived of an ambisexual society in 1969 is remarkable enough!
"but it would be nice to have it understood that sometimes your own internal feeling of your own gender comes up with an error/not installed, and that's okay."
I like how you put that. :)