One author who seemed to have a clue was Robert A. Being a feminist who listened, Russ later repented her early simplistic view of trans people, and the book remains a classic of feminist SF, but is nonetheless problematic for trans women.
All of the “real” women in the world have long since gone off and founded a lesbian separatist state. In The Female Man, trans women are manufactured to provide compliant wives for men. Noted feminist writer Joanna Russ produced a book that dipped into the same well as that which inspired Janice Raymond‘s notorious polemic, The Transsexual Empire. Of course mainstream politics wasn’t the only influence.
It sounds very much like an idealized newspaper portrait of a “sex change.” The primacy of the gender binary is unquestioned (though Varley did allow for gays and lesbians). Sexual orientation is held to be inviolate, so if you start out a determinedly straight man you’ll be transformed into an equally determinedly straight woman, simply because your body has changed. For example, Steel Beach by John Varley postulates a world in which people merrily change between stereotypical macho males and stereotypical girly women. There’s very little understanding of gender identities or the idea that people may need to transition, as opposed to choose to do so. Throughout the 20th Century, it seemed that most of the authors who put gender changes in their books had never met an actual trans person. That’s clearly evident in discussions of gender. They may suggest possible futures – perhaps ones we need to guard against – but often these imagined futures are simply discussions of the present dressed up with spaceships and aliens as a means of encouraging the readers to think outside of the box. That is, the authors don’t generally try to predict what our world will look like in years to come. What do the leading names in the field tell us about the future of gender?Īctually, as most science fiction critics and writers will tell you, SF often isn’t about the future. Where might we go in the next 100 years? Well, when that sort of question comes up, people often turn to science fiction. Even the idea of gender as something separate from sex was unknown. A hundred years ago terms like “transsexual” and “transgender” didn’t exist. It has been quite a ride for trans folk of late.
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