The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Challenge of Sex

Sex is awkward no matter how you look at it - arguably yet another design flaw in our species. Solo sex is likely to be unsatisfying. Straight sex is fraught with gendered miscommunication. Gay sex presents serious reproductive issues. Transgender sex is... well, complicated. And all those don't even consider the morass of multiple simultaneous partners. But Ursula la/le Guin introduces a whole new level of awkwardness in her ambisexual humanoid aliens who shift gender monthly in response to their partners’ pheromones. No one knows if they’re hitting on getting hit on until the touching starts.

There are clear advantages of ambisexuality. Sexual equality is a matter of course. Since voluntary participation is necessary, rape is impossible. Everyone experiences the respective burdens of testosterone as well as child-bearing. Sexual jealousy and violence is eliminated. And the Incel movement has no reason to exist. Ambisexuality also probably reduces the propensity to war and the gender-induced machismo of two-sex societies.

On the other hand, there are a few problems. Gendered pronouns are out; but so is the neuter; the ambisexual are persons after all. Family relationships are rather more complex - one’s father may be one’s sister’s mother, for example (not even Yiddish has words for this sort of relation). Maternal and paternal genealogical lines can become indistinguishably mixed, leading to some rather interesting inheritance issues. Playing Mum off against Dad is unlikely to prove a winning childhood strategy.

Generally ambisexual individuals are about as ethically, psychologically, and politically diverse as binaries, even if a bit more emotionally intelligent on the whole. This seems to lead to less overt coercion but more covert intrigue. They tend to plot rather than hit each other. And while machismo is absent, a certain sort of complex politesse is essential for smooth social functioning. Subtlety for its own sake is de rigeur and tends to slow down discussion and decision to a crawl.

In her Introduction, la/le Guin provides an interesting explanation about the contents of this story. “Fiction writers,” she says, “at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!”

The truth la/le Guin is referring to appears to be that while sex is an irresistible force that profoundly influences the institutional structure of a society, it is not the determining factor of individual personality, purpose, or neuroses. Society adapts to the reality of its members, or should. When it doesn’t, by designating difference as perversion for example, it fails in its function of creating peaceful flourishing within itself and between it and other societies. Blessed are the peace-makers after all, especially the literate ones.

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