The cover of the first edition of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s groundbreaking 1969 book The Left Hand of Darkness, the people who live on the planet Gethen are androgynous, and don’t identify with a specific gender except during a period called kemmer when they become fertile and can have children. Despite this novel view of gender and gender roles, LeGuin uses the pronoun “he” as a neutral pronoun to describe the people on Gethen. Seemingly in response to LeGuin’s book and responding to the history of using “he” as an assumed neutral pronoun, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice features a major intergalactic civilization whose language has no concept of gender or gendered pronouns. Leckie chooses to use the pronoun “she” as the default neutral pronoun as she writes about this civilization. The Radch empire considers their ungendered language a mark of civilization, and characters often commit social gaffes when they visit other planets and make guesses at the genders of the people around them.

The cover for Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

Both of these science fiction novels attempt to describe civilizations that have moved beyond our human perception of gender and gender roles. However, in doing so, they are constrained by the language, tools, and perceptions of gender that already exist. These authors can’t invent a new gender in a vacuum, so they are forced to use our current understandings of gender as a reference point. Though they are trying to invent new genders and ways to understand gender on their own, their imaginations can’t move beyond societal iterations of gender. Even as they deliberately try to take gender out of the picture, these books prove that gender is something we do – even when we’re deliberately trying not to.