The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969. TFA's illustration is from a novel published in 1975. I can remember reading some scifi short story in which one of the main characters was trans basically as soon as I could read without vocalizing... so about 1982, '83? and that was something off a clearance pile at a used bookstore... This stuff has been around a long time. It wasn't always so blatantly political, though. The LessWrong folks are right about this one. [0]
In the past, whenever someone got pissed off enough to make a stink about some challenging detail of scifi, most fans just laughed at them. We should do that still. It's fine to criticize the less evolved assumptions embedded in old "space opera"-type stuff (or, really, more recent stuff like The Windup Girl, yeesh...), and it's fine to have tastes that don't perfectly mesh with such progressive authors as e.g. Miéville, so long as we don't take our own feelings too seriously.
In the past, whenever someone got pissed off enough to make a stink about some challenging detail of scifi, most fans just laughed at them. We should do that still. It's fine to criticize the less evolved assumptions embedded in old "space opera"-type stuff (or, really, more recent stuff like The Windup Girl, yeesh...), and it's fine to have tastes that don't perfectly mesh with such progressive authors as e.g. Miéville, so long as we don't take our own feelings too seriously.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i...