This essay is going to be published in my book Fantazi, Bilim-Kurgu ve başka meseleler (Fantasy, Science-Fiction and other matters), probably in early 2026. As is apparent from the title, the book will be in Turkish. I cannot include the Turkish version here, because I am still working on it.
I have no great opinion of [JK Rowling’s writing style]. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
Ursula Le Guin 2004, “Chronicles of Earthsea”, The Guardian.
The above quotation is from a 2004 interview with Ursula Le Guin, indeed a rare rebuke from somebody whose professed motto is “to subvert as much as possible without hurting anybody’s feelings.” When I first read this comment in the early 2010s, I had agreed with the “stylistically ordinary” and the “imaginatively derivative”, but found the “ethically mean-spirited” rather harsh. Little did I know! I should have trusted Le Guin’s compassionate wisdom, which would have kept her from making such a harsh comment, if she had not sensed something really fishy, indeed a distinct tinge of mean-spiritedness, lurking behind a pleasantly childlike and innocent story.
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) Le Guin did not see her assessment proven frighteningly right. To begin with, Le Guin was probably speaking about only the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997), and although the second, third, fourth and fifth books (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets [1998]; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [1999]; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire [2000] and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [2003]) had already been published by the time Le Guin was making her assessment, she does not seem to be aware of them. If she had been, she would probably have reconsidered her comment, “a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel’, good fare for its age group,” because by the fifth book, the series had already evolved into a rather adult gothic fantasy, a tendency which would continue with increasing intensity in the last two books of the series (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [2005] and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [2007]).
By year 2000, Rowling probably had gotten wise to the fact that the adults were gulping down her books, but the children not very enthusiastically so. So, she changed course, not very abruptly, but consistently enough, so that by the fourth book the Gothic elements almost drowned out the “kid’s fantasy”. I sometimes wonder whether she was aware of Le Guin’s warning about “writing for kids” using all the clichés and ending up having the adults read your books but not so much the kids:
Sure it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.
All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don’t be too scary, and be sure there’s a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on.
If you do all that, you might even write Jonathan Livingston Seagull and make twenty billion dollars and have every adult in America reading your book.
But you won’t have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at it, and they will see straight through it, with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away. Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them) but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic. (Le Guin 1979, 49)
On second thought, no, probably not; Rowling does not strike me as somebody who spends a lot of time reading Le Guin. She does, however, seem to understand that writing children’s literature using clichés such as keeping the sex out or making sure of the happy ending, will not win her the appreciation of children. So, she opts for the adult market and reneges on the not-being-too-scary part and goes Gothic. She does not, however, renege on sex-exclusion, although her characters age considerably during the 7-volume saga and reach “age of consent”. Harry was 11 in the Sorcerer’s Stone; considering that each book depicts a new “school year”, he (and his classmates) should be around 18 by the end. In another vein, Harry had killed Quirinus Quirrel when he was only 11, and killed Voldemort and several death-eaters at 18. But, believe it or not, at that age he hasn’t had sex yet. Neither have any of his classmates. So, Rowling partially adheres to the “kid’s fantasy” recipe in matters of sex, but not in matters of violence, mayhem and taking lives.
Admittedly, there are a few puppy-loves and crushes to go around (even when the characters are about 18), although these are rather sterile and strictly a-sexual, to say the least. The only real crush Harry has (before Ginny), Cho Chang, proves to be a snitch and a sell-out.[1] The “love affair” between Ron and Hermione is always at a pre-adolescent, hair-pulling level, even when they approach 18. The only “sex” we can surmise in Harry Potter, is nineteen years after the main action closes, when we meet the three almost-middle-aged couples (Ron and Hermione, Harry and Ginny, Draco and his wife [sic!]) with their children, in the very end. Since there were children, they must have had sex at one time or another, mustn’t they?
No sex also means no LGBTQI+. Harry Potter universe is already devastatingly poor as regards ethnic diversity; but it is completely lacking in sexual diversity. “But,” someone might say, “this is a children’s book!” Well, it did not stop the author to introduce violence, murder and mayhem starting from the third book onwards, did it? Children may witness violence and murder as everyday occurrences, but sexual diversity is a no-no? We shouldn’t inform our kids that there may be different sexual orientations and different life choices? The excuse that “this is children’s literature” does not hold water in Rowling’s case, because she has put that excuse aside when she forayed into Gothic Fantasy.
I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood concerning this point: I do not believe that children’s literature should be sex- and violence-free. I do not believe that children’s literature is sex- and violence-free. Anybody who has a modicum of understanding of fairy-tales, knows very well that they are laden with sex (both overt and covert) and violence. It is the agenda of the “modern” (read capitalistic), patriarchal, sexist conservatism that children’s literature should be devoid of sex, so that children should grow up as “innocent” (read ignorant), “pure” beings. Of course, they fail miserably, because children, being children, are more empathetic and more intelligent then these conservatives are. So, they learn about sex as a result of misinformation from untrustworthy sources (the internet nowadays!), botched and sometimes dangerous experiments and hasty deductions. Still, they learn much better than their elders. Because, we are bound to ask, how did their elders learn about sex in the first place? As a result of misinformation from untrustworthy sources (minus the internet), botched and usually dangerous experiments and hastier and more misinformed deductions. But their elders, the writers and promoters of so-called “children’s literature” are happy, because they deceive themselves in the belief that they have successfully swept sex and sexual diversity under the carpet.
All in all, we are expected to believe that there is no sex in Hogwarts, and, consequently, no LGBTQI+.
From Children’s Literature to Opinion Leadership
So far, we haven’t found convincing material evidence to support Le Guin’s accusation of “mean-spiritedness”; only evidence of a cunning swing from kid’s fantasy to Gothic fantasy, and extreme innocence in matters of sexuality.
There is, however, ample evidence to support it, starting from the fading away of Pottermania, so to speak. The last Harry Potter film was in 2011, fourteen years after the first Harry Potter book. The seven books and eight films of the Harry Potter franchise made Rowling a big celebrity (and filthy rich) roughly for fifteen years. Her rise to fame, and holding on to it for so long, seemed to multiply the phrase “fifteen minutes of fame” by several hundreds of thousands. But every good thing comes to an end. Judging from her later rather feeble attempts at continuing the Harry Potter story,[2] and her mildly successful attempt at Crime Fiction,[3] Rowling can be called a one-shot writer. Her immense success was in stretching out that one shot into almost two decades. So, when the Harry Potter fame ebbs, what better way to stay in the limelight other than expressing a strong and unwavering opinion in one of the most fiercely contested issues of the day? Rowling threw in her hat on the side of the TERFs (Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists)[4] and proceeded from liking some anti-trans posts in the social media in 2018 (could have been mistaken for almost-innocent fame-seeking) to openly calling a female boxer with a different set of chromosomes, Imane Khelif, a “man” and openly making fun of her in 2024. She wrote on Elon Musk’s X[5] that,
The idea that those objecting to a male punching a female in the name of sport are objecting because they believe Khelif to be ‘trans’ is a joke. We object because we saw a male punching a female. (X post, Aug. 2, 2024)
Calling somebody born and raised as a woman, in a culture (Algeria) that does not acknowledge trans-sexuality, and consequently does not allow sex-change operations, a “male”, is definitely mean-spirited, lacking in empathy, understanding and compassion. This proves Le Guin’s assessment of Rowling as “mean-spirited”, twenty years after she made it and six years after her death, to be truly prophetic, and actor Pedro Pascal raises the bet by calling Rowling’s attitude “heinous loser behaviour”.
Maybe we can now ask ourselves the questions, “Who is a man?” and “Who is a woman?”, or alternatively, “What is a male?” and “What is a female?” Especially in sports, you have to prove that you are a “woman” to be able to participate in women’s sports events, because being “a man” seems to be an unfair advantage. Even if we accept the norms of modern competitive sports, however, the proof does not seem to be that self-evident. In the 2024 controversy about the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the Russian-led IBA (International Boxing Association) of very dubious credibility, and the IOC (International Olympics Committee) did not adhere to the same definitions of “man” and “woman”.
How do we define a “man”? Is it the genitals we are talking about, the possession of a penis and of one to three testicles? Or is it the chromosomal structure, the existence of the rather poor and uncomplicated “Y” chromosome, carrying the single bit of information, “Here be a male!” in the telling 23rd pair? Then again, we can look for the heightened levels of testosterone secretion. Is it any one of these, two of these together, or all three that makes you a “man”? There is, however, one little complication: The first two are either/or questions. You either have a penis or not. You either have a Y chromosome or not. But the third one is a question of “how much”. How much testosterone makes you a “man”? We should set a limit, shouldn’t we? It now becomes a question of who should set a limit. Physicians (which ones?), the World Health Organisation, the International Boxing (or whatever sports you prefer) Association or the International Olympics Committee? We can see that with these considerations in mind, the seeming certainty of the first two questions also becomes suspect. What if there is a Y chromosome but no penis? Or a penis and a vagina and a uterus? What if there are two Y chromosomes? Will this give us “more than a man”? Actually, in a sense, yes. The 47,XYY karyotype (as it is called in medical jargon) males are usually taller than the average male (about 7 cm),[6] but a bit below average in intelligence. What happens when a 46,XY karyotype occurs in a female body? Should we believe the genetics or the body? Or, if the person in question is raised as a female, which is only normal because there is no routine genetic testing at birth, should we believe the genetics or the psychic construction?
These are the questions anti-trans ideologists decline to ask, or rather disavow, because for them there is only one Truth, albeit with two different names: if they are religious, it is the God’s Truth, and if not, it is the Nature’s Truth, that humankind is created (or evolved) as Man and Woman, and nothing in the whole universe can change that. We may call this an absolute faith in “the importance of biological sex”. This, however, is only one of the modes of thinking humankind has developed in its millions of years of existence, namely, the binary way. The Navajo (or Diné) nation, before the binary-minded Europeans arrived and massacred most of them, had four genders: asdzáán (feminine female), hastíín (masculine male), dilbaa (masculine female), and nádleehi (feminine male). There were other tribes with five genders, some with even more, and the concept of Two-Spiritedness was part of their norm. As the European way of thinking became the universal norm, due to the extremely fast and expansionist growth of capitalism, a European invention, gender was also crammed into the vise of the binary, into the poor choice of either/or.
But was it always so? Life as we know it started on Earth approximately 4 billion years ago. The history of gamogenesis (two-sexed reproduction) goes back only 1.2 billion years, less than a third of this larger history. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of all living beings on Earth are still agamogenetic (unsexed). Two-sexed reproduction came into being as a necessity, to provide for and enhance genetic diversity, hence faster and more numerous mutations. But this is also subject to change: yesterday’s necessity becomes today’s burden, and therefore subject to alteration by human beings. As it comes to pass, sexuality as we know it, is slowly but decisively being separated from reproduction,[7] and as a result, the necessity for the existence of two sexes is also starting to disappear. It is up to us, that is, the wordsmiths, to imagine what happens when sexuality divorced from reproduction becomes a reality on its own, and our lives start to change accordingly. Le Guin reminded us of this possibility as she spoke of a seemingly entirely different matter:
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. (Le Guin, National Book Award Acceptance Speech, 2014)
It is, of course, an option to refuse change, dig in our heels and jealously try to preserve the way “it has always been”, embrace the either/or, and demonise anyone who falls outside, above or in-between our beloved binary. But one may want to be careful about who their fellow travellers might be in this venture: is Elon Musk joining in the fray on our side? Are we going to get a standing ovation from Donald J. Trump? Is Viktor Orban or Tayyip Erdoğan going to be grateful for our help, however unintentional, in their Jihad against LGBTQI+?
Like it or not, however, there always will be others to speculate about a life without genders, or with many of them, or with differences of a completely dissimilar nature. Come to think of it, they had already started, almost forty years ago.
“Light is the Left Hand of Darkness”
In 1969, Ursula Le Guin published her fourth novel in the so-called “Hainish Cycle”, The Left Hand of Darkness. It did not chronologically or thematically follow the earlier three[8]; it was a story of a Terran envoy, Genly Ai, to a planet, Gethen, which existed in a state of permanent winter. The people living on Gethen resembled the Terrans (that is, us) in almost every aspect, except in a minor detail. They did not have gender.
That was years before the persistent and unending arguments around and about trans identities started. The novel’s publication, on the other hand, coincided with the Stonewall Riots, which started on June 28, 1969, a happy coincidence, to say the least. Stonewall Riots (or Revolution, whichever term you prefer to go with) symbolically marked the beginning of the radical LGBTQI+ movement in the US, and the “T” in that acronym also signifies the trans presence in that movement from the very start. When the SF & Fantasy community was drawn into the argument about and around trans rights, mostly due to Rowling’s enthusiastic involvement, SF writer John Scalzi commented in his website Whatever, as he felt obliged to speak in support of the trans community:
Moreover, and fully acknowledging my outsider status on this as a straight, cis man, it seems that any attempt to carve out trans people from queer culture runs smack into the fact that arguably there wouldn’t be a modern queer movement without Marsha P. Johnson throwing that shot glass (or brick, depending on who is telling the tale) at Stonewall. Trans people — and trans people of color — were present at the birth of the gay rights struggle in the United States. It’s their story as much as anyone else’s, as far as I can see. They can’t be separated out, nor should they be. (Scalzi 2020)
Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness before Stonewall and she had no way of knowing that gays, lesbians and trans people would spontaneously decide enough was enough and rise against police harassment and forced ghettoising the very year the novel was to be published. As usual, Le Guin’s novel was not a radical scheme to subvert the existing order all at once. It did not propose to change the genetic foundation of gender. Starting from a critical assessment of the social, economic and cultural inequities the present gender regime is based on, it went on as a “thought experiment”, a “What if?”, inviting us to question our supposedly self-evident presuppositions on gender. That was, of course, completely in line with Le Guin’s unique style of writing, where nothing “goes without saying”, nothing is taken for granted, nothing is self-evident:
Why did I invent these peculiar people? Not just so that the book could contain, halfway through it, the sentence “The king was pregnant” — though I admit that I am fond of that sentence. Not, certainly not, to propose Gethen as a model for humanity. I am not in favor of genetic alteration of the human organism — not at our present level of understanding. I was not recommending the Gethenian sexual setup: I was using it. It was a heuristic device, a thought experiment. (Le Guin 1989, 9)
The thought experiment was intended for us to question our prejudices on gender. If gender is based, as anti-trans people (like Musk or Trump) or trans-exclusive people (like Rowling or Navratilova)[9] insist, on biological sex, what happens if (and maybe when) biological sex itself disappears or becomes fluid? What if a person is “a woman as well as a man”? Le Guin first makes us ponder upon this probability: we have thought of the person in question, Estraven, the former Prime Minister of Karhide (a country in Gethen), as male; but now that he is in kemmer[10] and since they are alone with Genly Ai, he starts to appear as female, becomes female:
And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man. (Le Guin 1969, 248)
There is, however, another layer to this transformation, a layer that we haven’t considered yet: isn’t there another probability, that that person is also “a man as well as a woman”? In the passage above, we finally realise that we have always thought of Estraven as permanently male, although the concept of being “either male or female” permanently is completely foreign to Gethenian culture. Every Gethenian is either male or female during a very short period each month, and even then, these roles are not permanent. For most of their lives, they are neither male nor female, or both male and female. We can now see that we are cleverly manipulated by Le Guin’s consistent use of the “he/his/him” pronouns for every Gethenian throughout the novel.[11] It is almost a perfect example of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, making us look another way, and suddenly reveal that we were “looking awry” (or looking too straight) all the time. Ernst Bloch defines the Verfremdungseffekt as “the unexpected which clarifies our sight” (Bloch 1972, 125); the revelation of Estraven as “a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man” indeed clarifies our sight which was blurred and darkened by our prejudices about gender.
That is not all. A year later, in 1970, Robert Heinlein published I Will Fear No Evil, in which a business tycoon, 95 years of age, has his brain transplanted into the body of his young, female secretary, who was killed in a robbery of brain trauma. Now, we know that Ursula Le Guin is a feminist, has professed to be an anarchist, a Daoist, and somebody who has recourse to psychoanalysis most of the time, in short, resorting to almost every kind of subversion that American society can imagine. But Heinlein? He is a conservative, a right-wing libertarian, definitely not a feminist sympathiser, always promotes a militaristic sentiment, and has even signed a statement in 1968 to support the American war effort in Vietnam. Nevertheless, these two authors, despite being polar opposites in politics and sentiment, can agree in the imagination, to speculate upon the difference and clash of bodily and psychic genders. This is something SF literature has in common: crossing boundaries and questioning the “unquestionable”. Le Guin and Heinlein would have disagreed with each other on every single political issue, but they would still join together in trying to imagine outside the box of assigned, so-called “natural” gender.
In Heinlein’s novel, after the cross-sexual brain transplant, the almost-centennial male billionaire tries to adopt to the female body and succeeds to a certain point. Then he discovers that the remnants of the personality that formerly inhabited that body was still there. The consciousness of the young secretary with whom he was secretly and hopelessly in love, was still alive. The rest is a love story between two awarenesses, one male and the other female, sharing the same female body. Heinlein, although a staunch defender of polygamy (for both sexes, to be fair) and a certain degree of sexual liberation, still does not include gay, lesbian or trans sexualities in his libertarian agenda. But he can imagine, and write about, a man living in a female body, and this is one of the first steps for understanding trans identities.
In 2020 Rowling claimed that biological sex is the true basis of gender; it is a theoretical presupposition and we may agree to disagree with her. But in 2024 she followed this up with a social-media attack on a female boxer with a different genetic structure, calling her a “man”. Now, this is not just a “theoretical presupposition”, it is blatantly false, and it is definitely mean-spirited. This mean-spiritedness, however, is not due to a character deficit or an innate evil disposition. It is a result of an inability to imagine radically different bodies, radically different identities and radically different psychological constitutions. I am not seeking to draw ethical and/or political conclusions from this, but only trying to show that a lack of imagination, the failure to imagine something radically different, must involve, or end up in, a lack of compassion, empathy and understanding. It takes a visionary like Le Guin to foresee that this “mean-spiritedness” is actually a lack of imagination, years before the fact, having read only one book of “kid’s fantasy” by Rowling. The rest of us had to wait for the other shoe to drop.
Perhaps it is best to revisit a quote used by Le Guin herself in 1974, as she concluded one of her essays. Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the most important Romantic poets of the early 19th century, says in A Defense of Poetry, an essay he wrote to uphold the necessity of poetry (and indeed all literature):
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. (P. B. Shelley 1890 [1821], 14)
[1] Incidentally, Cho is the only character in Harry Potter books of Asian ethnicity, and she is portrayed as a snitch and a villain. Other non-white ethnicities are also under-represented (one case of twin Indians and three very minor blacks). The wizarding world seems to be almost-all-white, although the antagonists’ enmity and hate towards muggle-borns and “mudbloods” (muggle/wizard hybrids) may be considered, if you are on one of your magnanimous days, as a metaphor for racism.
[2] The Harry Potter offshoots after the original series ended were: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (play, 2016); Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists (stories, 2016) Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies (stories, 2016); Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide (supplement, 2016); From the Wizarding Archive: Volumes 1 and 2 (supplement, 2024). Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film, 2016); Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (film, 2018); Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore(film, 2022). None of these came even close to the success of the original series.
[3] The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013); The Silkworm (2014); Career of Evil (2015); Lethal White (2018); Troubled Blood (2020); The Ink Black Heart (2020); The Running Grave (2023). The first book started “selling” only after the revelation that author Robert Galbraith was in fact J. K. Rowling.
[4] TERF is not a term accepted by people who question and belittle trans identities; it is used rather pejoratively by people who defend trans rights.
[5] My comment involving Elon Musk in the argument shouldn’t be taken as a sucker punch, an attempt at a cheap ad hominem. Musk himself was involved in the argument, reposting a message that said “men don’t belong in women’s sports.” It is mildly interesting to note that a self-styled feminist and an ardent Trump supporter who also wholeheartedly promotes Neo-Nazis in Germany, would join in calling a (supposedly) trans person, a “man”.
[6] Do I, for instance, a rather short male with a certain liking for basketball, have the right to petition the FIBA and the NBA to exclude 47,XYY karyotype males from basketball matches, because it is unfair to me, a male with only one Y chromosome?
[7] The separation had already started millennia ago when human beings invented the first devices for birth control, that is, sexuality without reproduction, and it reached the breaking point when they invented, in the 20th century, artificial insemination, that is, reproduction without sexuality. In 1985, Cardinal Ratzinger (who would later become Pope Benedict XVI) warned in his famous “report”, that:
The separation of sexuality from procreation has led to the opposite extreme, the nightmare scenario of making procreation independent of sexuality through medico-technical experimentation. (Ratzinger 1985, 84-5)
Two years before Ratzinger, LGBTQI+ scholar and activist John D’Emilio had already remarked that
[C]apitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation. Human sexual desire need no longer be harnessed to reproductive imperatives, to procreation; its expression has increasingly entered the realm of choice. Lesbians and homosexuals most clearly embody the potential of this split, since our gay relationships stand entirely outside a procreative framework. (D’Emilio 1983, 110)
[8] Rocannon’s World (1966); Planet of Exile (1966); and City of Illusions (1967).
[9] Yet another heartbreak! When Martina Navratilova, for whom I cheered for decades, joined in the fray, it was in order to put down Pedro Pascal, calling him “Another Johnny come lately telling women to STFU [Shut the Fuck Up].” Pascal, of course, was doing no such thing, other than calling bullies, bullies who can be of both (or all) genders.
[10] Kemmer is the name of the period Gethenians become sexually active and fertile. Rest of the time they are androgynous and infertile. In kemmer they become either male or female, but this is for that specific kemmer only. In other kemmer periods, they may become, again, either male or female. There is no permanent predisposition for either sex. They tend to become other sex than their current partners, or whoever they are with at the moment. Since Genly Ai (the narrator) was permanently male, it was natural for Estraven to kemmer as female. As a side comment, Le Guin later said she regretted the straight-sex prejudice in this setup:
“[I quite unnecessarily locked the Gethenians into heterosexuality. It is a naively pragmatic view of sex that insists that sexual partners must be of opposite sex! In any kemmer- house homosexual practice would, of course, be possible and acceptable and welcomed—but I never thought to explore this option; and the omission, alas, implies that sexuality is heterosexuality. I regret this very much.]” (Le Guin 1989, 14)
[11] Le Guin’s defence of this use involves rather grammatical concerns (at least in 1976), and she does not mention any attempt at Verfremdungseffekt. Regardless of her intentions, however, the effect is still there. In 1989, however, she regrets such use and retracts her defence:
[This “utter refusal” of 1968 restated in 1976 collapsed, utterly, within a couple of years more. I still dislike invented pronouns, but I now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech.] (Le Guin 1989, 15)
References
Bloch, Ernst (1972). “Entfremdung, Verfremdung: Alienation, Estrangement”, in Brecht, ed. Erika Munk. Bantam.
D’Emilio, John (1983). “Capitalism and Gay Identity”; in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality; eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson. Monthly Review Press.
Heinlein, Robert A. (1970). I Will Fear No Evil. Berkeley Medallion.
Le Guin, Ursula K. (1976 [1969]). Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Books.
Le Guin, Ursula K. (1982 [1979]). The Language of the Night. ed. Susan Wood. Berkeley.
Le Guin, Ursula (2004). “Chronicles of Earthsea”, The Guardian, 9.2.2004. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin
Le Guin, Ursula K. (1989). Dancing at the Edge of the World. Grove Press.
Ratzinger, Joseph A. and Vittorio Messori (1985). Ratzinger Report on the State of the Church. Ignatius Press.
Rowling, J.K. (2020). “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues”. https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
Scalzi, John (2020). “Generation X and Trans Lives”. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/06/11/generation-x-and-trans-lives/
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1890 [1821]). A Defense of Poetry. The Athenæum Press.