Figuring It All Out: My Genderfluid Life

"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

I think about this every hour of every day of every month by the way

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely "taken off" the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite "he," which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that "I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns."

I tell you this only because the phrase "I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns" is one I think about a lot.

“suffering feels religious if you do it right” no shut up it doesn’t. my friends laughing in the kitchen while i make dinner feels religious. the sun on my face after a long winter feels religious.

somebody in the notes posted this screenshot from the one & only, ursula k let guin. and now i'm screaming wtf

Remember when Ursula K. Le Guin called JK Rowling a nasty basic bitch back in like, 2004? We should have listened

i found the specific quote i was thinking of x

damn gurl :’]

Don’t forget, Ursula K. Le Guin’s parents were some of the earliest sociologists, and they studied people for a living with their child right along with them. She experienced watching and learning from other cultures first-hand when she was young, and it obviously stuck with her her whole life. She always took care to treat her characters, human or “alien,” with humanity, which is something JKR didn’t do even from the get-go. 

She’s not just burning JKR either, but the whole publishing/film powerhouse that uncritically got behind her and made her the nasty billionaire she is today.