Tuesday Smillie critiques Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic feminist science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Basically, the novel is set in a fictional universe where the humanoid population are inhabited by brown skinned, androgynous, and gender-fluid people and something happens. Le Guin’s novel explored the effects of gender and sex on cultures and society. It breaks away the norms and relationships that is usually enforced within the systems of racism and binary gender that is found in society. This world offers an imagination of what could and/or would happen in alternative order of a human society.
However, as a white transgender woman, Smillie criticized how Le Guin and The Left Hand of Darkness “failed to critically engage the heteronormative gender binary Le Guin set out to interrogate.” Smillie and other critics scrutinized how Le Guin were consistent in the use of male pronouns to identify non-gendered characters, limited the physical configuration of human bodies, adverted the exclusiveness of any homosexual exchanges, and had little engagement of race. Responding to criticism, Le Guin wrote an essay, “Is Gender Necessary?,” and revised it twelve years later to take ownership of her past mistakes. “By looking to Le Guin’s practice as a model, we find that the radical act is how we proceed as our failure becomes clear.”