Welcome to the conversation!

I actually stumbled across a Youtube of The Lathe of Heaven last night and got partway into it -- intriguing for a number of reasons including the fact that it was one of the first TV movies and both the musical score and the acting style feel like they come from such a different era.  It was too late to finish the whole thing, but I'll get back to it -- sure had vivid dreams after watching it, though -- thankfully, not effective ones!

I really want to read The Left Hand of Darkness, but haven't yet been able to find it in an accessible format. I will eventually, though!

I both agree and disagree with you on gender. First, I was struck by how much what you said about gender being just one thing about you and not defining you reminded me of Adam's comments about sexual orientation, and I think that's so. I think when someone from the heteronormative community looks at someone outside that community, we assume that it must be such a big thing to be "outside" that it MUST define your experience of all of life ... but we think that about celebrities, too, right? Adam seems determined to tell people that no, he doesn't dress glam all the time, isn't fabulous all the time, has the same friends he always has, and doesn't sleep hanging upside down from a curtain rod -- again, we tend to assume that someone rich and famous has a life defined by those conditions, but the human experience is more similar than dissimilar despite the trappings. Anne Lamott often says that aspiring writers assume that being published will "solve" (or perhaps justify) their lives in some way, but that it isn't so, that being published will just highlight whatever neuroses and insecurities they have all the more ... So, yes, ditto with gender. I recall as a young woman being told more than once that I "think like a man," and at that time (the late 70s and early 80s) that was meant and received as a compliment! I'm still shaking my head over that ... but it relates to what you say about the mind being neither gender.

At the same time, I am the mother of one boy and one girl, and they have rocked my original assumptions that gender had more to do with nurture than with nature, and I hear the same thing from most of the other moms of kids of both genders. And that's bearing in mind that my daughter loves video games, manga, Comicon conventions and other typically "boy" stuff and favours sweatpants and a t-shirt pretty much 24/7.

I also find the conventional conceptions of masculine and feminism a helpful shorthand if we can dispatch with the biological determinism that sometimes goes along with that ... the helpful part, for me, is in looking at the full range of human potential, looking at where we may need to develop more of this or that aspect of ourselves with a view toward wholeness. I personally tend to sit most naturally in the "passive/receptive" end of the scale often characterized as the feminine, but need to work on being my ability to be more active and initiative. Similar to how I think the Myers Briggs personality types are meant to be used -- they show you your "resting" strengths and tendencies and show you where you might want to develop. I can see, however, that because the feminine has been so under-valued, people might want to move toward a different way of characterizing what were previously conceptualized as masculine and feminine energies.