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Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

NA

I'm not sure what anyone here means by "gestalt," but in LHoD, people go into kemmer once a month and adopt either male or female sexual characteristics, usually dependent on the current sex of the person they have close physical contact first. So like, if a person going into kemmer gets a big hug from someone currently male, that person will become female for that kemmer. If the person gets pregnant during kemmer, then they'll remain female until the child is born. When not in kemmer, people lose their sexual characteristics. So most people are, IDK, agender most of the time.

Most of this comes out of a short story published separately, "Coming of Age in Karhide."

Re: wank containment area

[(Anonymous)]

da

For context on this, in the original book, it's mentioned that being near a male or female person can sway their kemmer, for example, Estraven kemmered as a woman because of Genly (a regular cis dude) being in the tent with him. At the time, that was a bit of worldbuilding to basically make it reproductively viable, since kemmer was a biological function for reproduction, and it would be unfortunate if a couple who wanted to reproduce just couldn't manage to kemmer into reproductive compatibility. But Le Guin was unhappy with the implication that it meant no one on Gethen was gay or bi! All this gender-transgressive worldbuilding, to create a world where only "het" sex can exist? (Insomuch as it could be considered het, since that's only physical sex--still, it implies those are the anatomical configurations forced on people.) Coming of Age in Karhide was an attempt to address that, saying that yes, kemmers are influenced by the sex of who's around you, but once you've kemmered as male or female, you're free to choose partners of any configuration that suits you, and follows a character who kemmers as female, tries male-kemmered and female-kemmered partners, and decides she likes f/f sex the best.

As for gender identities, while their bodies are physically neuter while out of kemmer, I don't think it follows that they're agender. A lot of what she seemed to be getting at in Left Hand was that they're both, rather than neither, so I would assume most Gethenians fall somewhere on the bigender spectrum. People who were permanently physically male or female were disdained and pitied and called "half-deads," implying that they were seen as having less gender/sex than the average Gethenian, not more, because they lacked the potential to become one sex. (They were also, however, called "perverts," for the implication that they're horny all the time. Gender in this worldbuilding is complex!)

The character in Coming of Age in Karhide, despite having a normal kemmer cycle, identifies as more female than male, and says that runs in her family. So it doesn't seem unheard of for Gethenians to lean more towards one gender or the other, but I think few ever lose that duality completely. So some might be 50/50 bigender, but some might be more like 90/10. I think one of the things Le Guin was going for with that is that the average person could not divorce themselves entirely from half of humanity, that there would always be some degree of empathy and shared experience. It's textual in Left Hand that Gethenians were created by the Hainish through genetic modification (the Hainish being aliens and the first humanoids, a high-tech society that existed at godlike tech levels lifetimes of stars ago and spread humanoids through the universe because they were lonely, with modifications here and there for funsies)as an experiment to see if sex-based oppression could be ended by making everyone both male and female. It was published in 1969, and I think exploratory fiction on ideas of gender and sex that were arising in feminist circles then. As exploratory fiction, she doesn't quite answer her own questions. The Gethenians have no war, but she attributes this to their inhospitable climate giving them a thin margin of survival as it is, not to their genital configuration. The book more just raises the question, meditates on it, and neither endorses nor condemns the possibility.