Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness

In today’s world, there exists many binary systems: hot and cold, light and dark, good and evil, the list goes on and on. One of the most important binary systems we have is in gender, male and female. The span of human history has seen the creation and development of societal expectations based on a person’s sex. While the system is far from perfect, with gender inequality continuing to exist across the globe, humanity has accomplished much with this system. Ursula Le Guin uses The Left Hand of Darkness to pose an interesting question: what would a world be like where gender did not exist? On Gethen, the setting of the book, the people are androgynous, only taking on sexual characteristics a few days a month for the purpose of procreation.
There exists in our society a constant sexual urge, an instinctual desire dating back to our time as cavemen to find a mate and procreate. This sexual urge provides us with an energy that many talented individuals have put to other uses, such as the arts and science. The people of Gethen lack this sexual motivation, and have suffered technologically and scientifically as a
The fact that there exists no gender means that there exists no gender stereotyping or oppression. The societal limits of what a man or female can accomplish do not exist on Gethen. In fact, the Gethen world is one where people are “… respected and judged only as a human being.” (Guin 49) The lack of men wanting to prove their masculinity may also be a contributing factor to the lack of war on Gethen. Why, then, can our own world not follow a similar path and reap these rewards? Simply put, humans are biologically and culturally incapable of such a thing. Biologically, humans possess an innate desire to procreate; if we were to convert to androgyny, it would take either millions of years of evolution or a large-scale genetic mutation. In fact, one of the underlying theories in the book made by an Investigator is that the Gethenians were experiments, humans made androgynous and set loose on Gethen by the Hainish. Culturally, gender roles and identities are so deeply ingrained in our society that it would be difficult to abandon the notions that we have been developing over the course of our existence. We will have to find a solution to gender inequality other than the elimination of gender.

The Left Hand of Darkness was written as an interesting thought-experiment on a neuter world, desiring to discover the result of removing sexual roles