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Kim Stanley Robinson, science fiction, and the limits of what you can imagine
A couple times on this forum Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR, for short) has come up. He's an American science fiction writer who plies mainly in hard(er) science fiction, and especially likes to play with themes that explore the interactions between technology, culture, and economics. He takes some limitation of humans and imagines: what if it were not so? How would we change, what could we do, what new things would we discover about ourselves? He's a bit of a granola-eating utopian socialist so I'm sure some here would have certain ideological objections to his writing. But it's nice sometimes to read work from someone who has a fundamental sort of optimism for humanity, that we might one day be able to put aside our differences and Figure It All Out.
His "Mars trilogy" (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) might be his masterpiece, and extends his inquisitive nature. A depiction of the colonization of Mars over centuries, there is an endless series of problems for the characters to solve; some scientific in nature, but more than that organizational and cultural. The colonization of a virgin world yields all kinds of conflicts where there can be no true compromise between people with differing fundamental values. Alongside the geoengineering of Mars proceeds the genetic engineering of the human race, as scientists begin to unlock the ability to greatly extend the lifespan of humans. This might just have originated as a conceit by KSR to keep most of the characters across the centuries required for the geological drama to play out, but he dives fully into imaging all the upheaval such an advance would yield.
There are Luddites, reactionaries, those who wish to monopolize longevity for themselves, a great and deep anger from the masses at the prospect that immortality might be denied to them. There are myriad complications and problems; certain limits prove tricky to overcome. But technological progress is an unyielding wave, and by the end of the series humans dabble in every kind of imaginable self-customization, from the crucial to the trivial: yes, all sorts of environmental adaptations to Mars' ecosystems are quickly developed, but so are custom mixes of psychoactive drugs. People create physical backups of themselves so they can do dangerous sports. All sorts of modifications can be sought to fill the spiritual and emotional void. People delay their physical decrepitude indefinitely. Women put off having children into their 300s.
But what people don't do is change their sex. The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child. There is no mention of purely cosmetic alterations to simply imitate the opposite sex, or become some even more complex sexual entity now that technology enables them to do so. No character ever feels any deep or emergent desire to push past this one final barrier, when all the others have already been crossed. And it's not like KSR is some prude or philosophically opposed to it; his more recent novels feature trans and non-binary characters, and in those that feature similar types of possibility with respect to genetic engineering people freely experiment with switching sexes even if they do not have some form of dysphoria. The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.
Most of the original hundred colonists are either American or Russian; one might speculate that if the books had been started five years earlier, the latter would have been Soviet, and if they had been started five years later, perhaps Chinese. To some extent this is the problem of all science fiction that deals in the near future (the the trilogy begins in the far-off future of 2026); it is far enough away to be unable to predict with certainty but close enough that mistakes seem obvious in hindsight. But I think this is also somewhat of a humbling notion that we just might not be as good at predicting societal changes as we might flatter ourselves to be. I used to feel that they were more strongly tied to material/economic forces; in recent years I've become less sure. When it comes to predicting the grand arc of human civilization it is a lot easier to look a fool than a wise man. I'm glad that there are people who are willing to ignore that and take a stab.
That's possible -- I learned about trans-* stuff pretty early, chronologically, due to the overlap in some fandom spaces, and I still didn't learn a lot of the more practical details for trans men until ~2003-05ish -- but I'm not sure it's obviously true. People have already brought up Heinlein, but scifi and general literary fiction already had some heavy genderfuckery already; while not all of it would fit the modern-day understanding of transgender (Woolf's 1928 Orlando: butch woman or nonbinary, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after 10000 pages), or be particularly palatable to the modern-day trans movement (When Gravity Falls postulates a Muslim-dominant future where the protagonist's girlfriend is a trans woman prostitute, 1987).
More broadly, Ranma 1/2 had its American debut in 1993. In comics, Alan Moore's Promethea (with a very explicit contrast between gender-stuff and homosexuality) wasn't at that part of the plot until 2001 or so, but Camelot 3000 had a person reincarnated into the opposite gender in 1982. Neil Gaiman had Wanda Mann, who outside of the unfortunate name, was otherwise handled pretty well in 1991 (and probably a response to an earlier Sandman series only mentioning trans women as a serial killer's victims. Grant Morrison wrote Lord Fanny in 1994, who... was about as poorly written as you'd expect given the name or Morrison being involved. There were a handful, and of course outsider pieces tended to be even more esoteric.
Transmale characters were much less common, but they did exist.
This isn't to say Robinson had to know of any of these, but neither was it that far off from the opportunity. (Including physically; Davis California isn't San Francisco, but it was only an hour or hour-and-a-half drive, and the DSA circles there in the 1990s had a lot weird people of all kinds.)
((And, on the other direction, I'm pretty sure your point would apply to Woolf; the mechanics and philosophy for gender stuff in that era existed, up to and including Hirschfeld giving out 'gender passes', but was different enough from modern understandings that even had the notorious recluse learned of them they wouldn't have been very predictive for the future.))
An alternative explanation is that regardless of what Robinson could have imagined, he was writing for his audience, and while trans stuff wasn't well-known in that era, The Silence of the Lambs was 1991. I (and the film) would argue Buffalo Bill is not trans so much as just hates himself, but the film had to argue that in part because trans_vestitism_ at least was well-enough known for at least part of the audience to react to that. A careful author can avoid issues, but a careful author can also avoid problems by not stepping on landmines.
People seeking sexual reassignment surgery goes back to the 1950's. Probably the first normie-famous case was Renee Richards who transitioned in the 1970's and played women's tennis as a transwoman. I'm not sure about the legal history in the US, but in the UK the classical legal case was Corbett vs Corbett in 1970 which held that a marriage between a man and an MtF transsexual was invalid on the grounds that she was legally male. So trans people existed at the time KSR was writing, and someone who was familiar with the weirder fringes of progressive politics (as I think KSR was) would have known about them. But even among people who were all-in on the 1990's PC wave, they were not an important left-wing cause. In UK student unions, the "T" got added to "LGBT" around 2000.
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