XY, XX, or Neither?

In the book Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, we are introduced to Genly Ai, an envoy for the Ekumen with the mission of creating an alliance with a planet called Gethen (also known as Winter). Gethenians aren’t quite like what Genly is, and he is having a difficult time seeing them as they see themselves. I suppose you could say he’s going through some major culture shock – which, by the way, is definitely a part human nature. It’s clear that even after being on Gethen for almost two years, Genly still can’t wrap his head around the fact that Gethenians are, for the most part, a genderless specie (race?).

Right from the get go it is revealed that there are defined genders where Genly is from, and it would seem that males are the dominant ones – no surprise there. On page 12, Genly discusses how his efforts to see Gethenians through their own eyes always “[takes] the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.” Genly refers to almost every character he meets as a male rather than a female, especially those with power/authority – Estraven and King Agraven, for example, and even his landlady he called a “voluble man” (47). This then brings me to my next point, it would seem as though his regard for the female gender is quite low. While he was having supper with Estraven, he notes that he was acting womanly and says it was “all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit” (12). Anyways, their androgynous biology is the main source of his overall confusion and difficulty to really understand the Gethenian society.