Ursula Le Guinis (“is” because her best work will long outlast her death) a thought experimenter. This is a common denominator of many science-fiction writers, butLe Guinis more ambitious in her choice of experiments than most of her peers, & more assiduous in tracking the consequences of those choices.InThe Dispossessedthe experiment is “What if a society evolved where nobody owned anything?” InThe Left Hand of Darknessit is,“What if gender was not fixed but serially mutable?”For most of their twenty-six-day month & cycle,Getheniansare androgynous & celibate, but for two or three days of kemmer they become sexually active as either male or female, with no say in which. Any individual, then, can be both a mother & father, & can bear & sire children. (This physiology gives rise to the novel’s most memorable line, “The king was pregnant.”)Genly—like most of the book’s readers—possesses a single one unchanging gender, making him, from aGethenianperspective, a biological anomaly to be pitied—or, less kindly, mistrusted as a “pervert.” True to the greatest science fiction,Gethenis the thumbprint whose thumb is our own world, and the gender fluidity ofGetheniansposes questions for the Homo sapiens ofEarth.Le Guinis unafraid to take her time examining these questions.Does violence have a gender? Rape does not exist onGethen, & seduction “would have to be awfully well timed,” but what of marriage, sexism, misogyny, & feminism? Is gender at the core of the self, or is there a deep-down“Gethenian layer”where we, too, are neither male nor female? Is gender as immutable as most cultures onEarthstill insist? Like a benign relative struggling with his own transphobia,Estravenstruggles to understandGenly; & through