meau tender (the account formerly known as hector sperra)

one neat thing about the way left hand of darkness is written—that the people of karhide, of gethen or winter not in kemmer, are bestowed the pronoun "he" as individuals, by mass and default—is that the histories of this world read much like the histories of our own. in much of history, everyone is a man; men make and mark the changes of history, and men beget every generation of men. by setting up the lens of a solitary pronoun, of a monogender culture that we simultaneously know to be much, much more texturally varied by the experiences of characters during and before the text, our mental model reads a story of men and then works to rewrite it with the ambiguity of that reality. in this same way then, reading our own histories, one works to rewrite their isomasculinity, to match the ambiguity of our reality as well