Zack_M_Davis comments on Open Thread: December 2009

[Zack_M_Davis]

Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns

I had read a very fine SF novel, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, in which all the characters are humanoid hermaphrodites, and was wondering at the obduracy of the English language, in which everybody is “he” or “she” and “it” is reserved for typewriters. But how can one call a hermaphrodite “he,” as Miss Le Guin does? I tried (in my head) changing all the masculine pronouns to feminine ones, and marveled at the difference. And then I wondered why Miss Le Guin’s native “hero” is male in every important sexual encounter of his life except that with the human man in the book. ----Joanna Russ, afterword to “When It Changed”