Bolan is an English instructor, playwright, essayist and fiction writer, who has published science fiction. In the following essay, she explores the problems of androgyny as it relates to the plot, pronoun usage, and the missing scene in The Left Hand of Darkness.

An Androgyne is a person possessing the traits of both sexes, a hermaphrodite—strictly speaking, a sexual aberrant. But on the planet Winter in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness , everyone is an androgyne, fully functioning as a male at certain times, a female at others, and favoring neither sex. This intriguing notion, so brilliantly conceived by the author, has elevated the Hugo-and Nebula-winning novel to classic status. Yet, androgyny is the element most often criticized in this landmark work, androgyny as it relates to plot and the choice of pronoun. The plot might have been made whole, although the pronoun...