I'm thinking about ways of doing gender in science fiction and fantasy.

I've noticed a tendency towards "default gender diversity" in SFF lately: no sex-class system, transness as accepted minority, but no wider implications for social structures. But...

...does this miss some of the potency of feminist SFF? It was a staple of mid-20th century SFF that ending the sex-class system required more fundemental change, particularly in kinship structure and economic relations.

What are fictional gender worlds you find most exciting?

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
- Eugenic reproduction outside the womb
- Collective child-rearing
- Body modification of sex characteristics as the norm
- Loose kinship structures
- Egalitarian socioeconomic structures

Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three
- Eugenic reproduction in the womb
- Collective child-rearing
- No sex-class system
- Homosexuality as dominant social norm
- No transness
- Kinship shifting from family to collective, contested
- Egalitarian, peaceful, but strong social coercion

Ursula Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness
- Ambisexual society: no fixed sex, bodies change and roles taken on during reproductive cycle
- Collective child-rearing
- Peaceful society with few crimes of violence, but strong social hierarchies

Yoon Ha Lee, Machineries of Empire
- Free choice of reproductive options, including external & eugenic
- No one kinship structure, but family & caste very important
- Medical transition freely-available social norm, but dispreferred in some factions
- Violent, hierarchical

Iain M Banks, Culture series
- It's the norm to be trans, medically or otherwise
- Post-scarcity society, no fixed hierarchy
- Society defended by war, violence, colonisation
- Don't think he really deals with reproduction and kinship in response to post-scarcity?

Neon Yang, Tensorate series
- Elective gender society: individuals choose a gender presentation (including physical transition if desired) around adolescence.
- No sex class system, no preferred sexuality
- But also zero world-style reproduction and familial wealth hoarding

Thanks for all your comments! Some thoughts:

Mid-20th century feminist SFF responded to the politics of the time, & was heavily concerned with how changing reproduction and kinship would change society. Many contemporary writers remember the gender diversity & not the politics.

Feminist and queer SFF imagination has opened up the possibilities of what gender can look like in other and future worlds, but for some writers this has now become a list of menu options, not a way of thinking rigorously about gender as a social structure.

But also, some contemporary trans and queer SFF responds to the (sometimes critical) utopianism of earlier feminist SFF by creating worlds in which transness and queerness are normal and society is still shit. What politics does this represent, I wonder?

The dominant current tendency, Default Gender Diversity (and its cousin Default Racial Diversity), is a reflection of contemporary liberalism: a picture of a world in which identities are not produced by economic relations, but are all equally accepted, whatever the society.

Some areas I haven't seen explored much and would like to read:
- What happens in a society with external and highly-assisted reproduction which is not eugenicist?
- Can you have collective, non-familial kinship and still have wealth-hoarding? What would this do to society?

- What even is transness in a society without a sex-class system? Why would people transition, and how?

- If there was patriarchy in the past, what actually happened to produce these gender worlds?

- What happens in a world where being cis is a weird fetish? (Mitchison did this with heterosexuality.)

- Can you have transness-is-ordinary in a world with wealth hoarding and restricted access to healthcare? How?

tl;dr: Gender is a socioeconomic structure integral to how any society operates and you can't just abstract gender diversity into your representational fantasy. Read classic feminist SFF and then write it better.