Genly Ai's Views On Gethenians

In the novel Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai is sent to Gethen on an important mission. Genly has a hard time seeing Gethenians like the see themselves because there is a big difference in biology, for example, Gethenians are androgynous which basically means that a Gethenian can be either a female or male when going into kemmer. The world from where Genly comes from, everyone has a gender, unlike the Gethenians which is something Genly can’t seem to wrap his head around to. He imposes the male pronoun on genderless individuals which only makes him confuse himself. “…the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own,” Genly admits that he imposes this “gender role” bias because he’s never been expose to this and so he comes off as a sexist.  Another factor may be that in Gethen everything is different such as how the months and days go by and how Gethenians’ behavior, “ His face worked and changed, and he caught his breath in a sob. Most Karhiders cry easily, being no more ashamed of fears than of laughter.”(106) In this quote we see that Karhiders can be very emotional but we also know that earlier in the novel, they are hard to understand because they don’t express themselves like Genly would. As we can see Genly isn’t opened minded because he doesn’t try to understand these people, he’s been there for about 2 years and he still struggles to see them as they see themselves.