"The Left Hand of Darkness" was published in 1969. I'm a transgender person in my 30s and Le Guin's writing makes me emotional every time I reread it. The ideas about gender and sexuality are more mainstream than they were almost 60 years ago, but the future is not evenly distributed and I think TLHOD would be eye opening for a lot of readers. Le Guin's prose and world building also place her among the best science fiction writers of all time.

I think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category. When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.

The core ideas are only mainstream in extremely modern and extremely liberal contexts. I bet the majority of teachers in this country would get shit for assigning this book, even at a college level.

Because it's a fucking great book.

Books aren't made just from concepts. It's a great exploration of human concepts and interactions.

Most people on earth still live in social and political environments where the core thought experiment of “The Left Hand of Darkness” – a human society without fixed male/female sexes – is not just unfamiliar but fundamentally unintuitive or threatening, which implies the book’s work is far from done.

In most countries, law, bureaucracy, language, and daily life remain built on a binary model of “men” and “women,” from ID documents to restrooms to family law. Surveys show that even where support for protecting transgender people from discrimination is relatively high, recognition of nonbinary identities and comfort with nonbinary social roles remains much weaker and highly contested. For a majority of readers shaped by these institutions, a society like Gethen, where nobody is permanently male or female and where gender roles have never crystallized, is not a recognizable extension of their world; it is a radical negation of how their societies are organized.

Globally, anti‑“gender ideology” movements and laws frame challenges to binary gender as dangerous Western imports, and they coordinate across borders from the US to Eastern Europe to parts of Africa and Asia. In places where same‑sex relationships are criminalized or where public discussion of queerness is suppressed, the premise of ambisexual humans would not just be controversial but literally unspeakable in mainstream forums. Even in regions that are relatively accepting of LGBT+ rights, polls show large minorities resistant to full legal and social recognition for trans and nonbinary people, indicating that the novel’s underlying claim – that gender categories themselves are contingent – remains outside everyday common sense.

Many major languages encode gender in grammar so deeply that even translating a gender‑ambiguous society is difficult, nudging readers back toward familiar male/female categories. This structural bias means that, for a majority of non‑English readers, the book’s attempt to erase stable gender can be partially blunted or reframed, underscoring just how far their linguistic and cultural worlds are from Gethen’s premise.

Research on nonbinary people repeatedly highlights “binary normativity”: the assumption that only two genders exist and are socially real, leading to erasure, misgendering, and lack of legal recognition. That everyday experience maps directly onto what Le Guin tried to imagine away on Gethen, showing that the novel’s central question – what happens to society when the binary disappears – still addresses a world that overwhelmingly cannot yet imagine such a disappearance. If most readers still inhabit strongly binary, often anti‑“gender ideology” cultures, then the book’s themes remain provocations from the margins rather than reflections of the mainstream, and its work of unsettling those assumptions is clearly not finished.

The keyword is now.

The first telephone is also pretty bad compared to nowadays phones.