How Is Gender Necessary By Ursula Le Guin

Aleah Smith

Response Paper 2

In a society ruled by the gender binaries between men and women, Ursula Le Guin challenged these ideas in her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin’s goal was to eliminate gender to discover what it truly means to be human. This book was a thought experiment in order to open the eyes of society and reflect on the constructs in place. However, Le Guin’s literary choices inhibited the reader from truly seeing Grethen as the sexless planet Le Guin hoped to portray. Although the inhabitants of Grethan are neither male nor female, Le Guin chose to use he/him pronouns to refer to them. In Le Guin’s essay “Is Gender Necessary”, she states “I call Gethenians ‘he’ because I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing

Unfortunately, the constant use of the masculine pronoun made it extremely difficult for the characters to be interpreted as menwomen. Every time the main character, Ai, met a new character, he instinctively used the masculine pronoun. At the very beginning of the book, there is a parade full of people and Ai naturally describes the people in the parade as men. “Next, forty men in yellow, playing gossiwors” (Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness 3). Ai knew that the inhabitants of Gethen were neither male nor female, but he never felt as though using “he/him” pronouns was too masculine or not complex enough to encapsulate the gender of Gethenians. In turn, it seemed as though Ai viewed Gethenans as males, leading the reader to as well. In Le Guin’s essay she originally said that she did not think the choice of the male pronoun for the novel was that important (Le Guin, “Is Gender Necessary?” 170). However, to the average reader getting a description of a character, one of the main components is their gender which is referred to in their pronouns. In order to combat the consistent use of “he/him” pronouns which enforced