I’m sort of reworking a MetaFilter comment into a post here, so bear with me, as I got a brainwave after some chance remarks about James Tiptree, Jr. As you know Bob, James Tiptree was in reality Alice B. Sheldon, who spent over a decade pretending to be a male writer and who during that time was feted as one of the few male science fiction writers actually able to grok women. Somebody asked why it was that so many people believed Tiptree for so long and whether this was all sexism, which somebody else said it was pure sexism and ignorance.
That too dismissive a response crystallised something for me, as I realised it wasn’t so much that these old time science fiction authors like Ellison or Robert Silverberg just couldn’t bring themselves to believe somebody who was that good a writer could be anything other than a male, but that they wanted to believe that it was possible for a male author to portray a female point of view and female characters so well as Tiptree did. Even in the early seventies there were female sf authors, even if they often had to hide between male sounding names (Andre Norton) or the careful use of initials (C. L. Moore), so that really couldn’t be the problem people had with Tiptree.
In fact, debate about his gender had been raging for years, with quite a few people convinced he was a pseudonym for a female writer, while others, like Silverberg, continuing to see something ineluctably masculine in him. What helped confirm the latter camp in their beliefs was that quite a few of them had had personal contact with Tiptree, writing lettres to each other, in which he presented the same as he did in public, so how could he be a woman?
But of course he was, which may have come as a disappointment to some people, who had hoped that it was possible for a writer with such an insight into, such empathy for women to be male, who saw Tiptree as a male counterpart to a Joanna Russ or Ursula LeGuin. Sadly, it wasn’t the case and somebody else had to prove that it was not impossible for a male science fiction writer to write about “womens issues”…
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