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I think this is more a limit of KSR's imagination than commentary on the time period. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969. It features a population that ordinarily have an asexual appearance (no secondary sex characteristics) but go into a kind of heat during which they can develop either set of secondary sex characteristics. What set of characteristics they develop isn't even consistent across heats! It's a setting where one's biological sex is very literally contextual, though not necessarily chosen.
Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” was 1958. I’m sure there are examples of earlier stories featuring gender reassignment as well. To the extent KSR chose not to have gender modification in a transhuman milieu, I doubt it was for lack of exposure to the idea.
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I read The Left Hand of Darkness earlier this year and was sort of surprised to see the amount of reading into it of exploration of trans topics. To me the novel did not really address what I could recognize as transgender/sexual themes. Rather Le Guin seemed much more interested in exploring masculinity/femininity as social constructs, and how a culture might be affected without "true" masculinity/femininity. Besides the toying with the reader of seeing the characters as male by default, the introspection seemed mostly to focus on what the cultures lacked in their essence by not being sexually dimorphic. E.g., Karhide is a society that simultaneously lacks female affection and childrearing, but also male obsession and capacity for war.
Maybe I have a sort of inherent bias against reading things as trans metaphors, but some of the reflections I read afterwards trying to tie the novel to contemporary trans politics seemed like rather clear misreads of the novel to me. Just my impression
Le Guin has this problem, in general , as also shown in A Wizard of Earthsea. Where, in every badly made adaptation the protagonist is made white instead of the intended black. I also imagined the protagonist white when I read them as a child.
Her problem is she is to good of a writer to make truly progressive works. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."
Wasn't his skin bronze or red-brown or something like that? I've always pattern-matched him to some sort of a Mediterranean dude in my childhood, darker than what we are accustomed to seeing today due to a more outdoors-oriented life of an islander.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin
I read this as more Polynesian than Mediterranean, but unsurprisingly, it sounds like it’s not supposed to map straight onto real demographics.
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I broadly agree that it's not, like, very specifically a trans metaphor. I think it is getting at something a little more fundamental, the idea of sex being social and contextual. This has obvious implications for trans people so I can see how people read a trans metaphor into it.
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