Secondly, TLTL is squaring off against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Consider, as a counterpoint, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, where the Radchaai Empire gender everybody as female. That is truly a gender-neutral setting — to the point that Breq really does consider gender expression to be inconsequential (IIRC — it’s been a few years since I read it…).

In TLTL, that is where the Seven Hives are trying to get to. They’ve adopted that ideal — hide your differences, and there will be no discrimination.

Which is basically: don’t ask, don’t tell.

And that’s kind of the thing: it sounds really good, at first flush. It sounded amazing to me in Ancillary Justice. It had me going, “gosh, what a utopian world!” at the beginning of TLTL. The goal — of ending discrimination, of granting people personal freedom to be as they wish, without scorn or judgment — sounds fantastic.

Note the twin thread TLTL give gender — religion,hidden in much the same way, for much the same reasons. Personally, I’m a very liberal Jewish Orthodox. And I can tell you I positively soared just at imagining the idea of faith, religion, being a personal thing — something a person lives his life by devoutly, but doesn’t need to constantly explain, defend, or be eternally lumped in with other people who share that particular marker.

The question is — and this is the question TLTL asks very explicitly — is whether this actually works. The goal of personal freedom and accepting others without bias is never in question; what is being examined is whether this particular method can actually get us there — or if it’s a way to bury the problem and hope it goes away.

I don’t think people want to hide their gender expression, or what they believe. I don’t think those things can be hidden, and the toll it would take to hide them would be tremendous. And, by misgendering everybody through Mycroft’s narration, and by the many many cracks in the supposedly-gender-neutral setting, I think that’s something Palmer is saying clearly: this isn’t something you can paper over. You want a world without gender discrimination; don’t settle for a world without gender. It’s not going to work out well.

Even if you stop people from knowing, you won’t stop them from guessing, from applying the same damned constructions and patterns. Even if most people want gender essentialism dead, the ones who benefit will toil to keep it alive. This shouldn’t deter us from the goal — but, the goal needs to be one of actually living within diversity, not in obscuring it in the name of avoiding fricton.

“We hope that we can make a better future, but have to accept that it will be a long, hard, and complex path,” Palmer has written of TLTL. This, I think, is the book’s credo — it portrays a society striving for utopia, but also one that’s not nearly as close as it thinks it is.