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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that very much. People can always be wilder than fiction. I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.

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> I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.

Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1964) had gender fluidity, before it was called that. It was central to the story.

Good point! Totally forgot about that one.

Greg Egan's _Diaspora_ (1997) and _Oceanic_ (1998) come to my mind. Of course not really predating, with what we now recognize as gender fluidity existing for thousands of years, but in any case early texts long before the notion rose to be widely known in our culture.

Those are probably written too late, I'd say they would need to be written in 1990 or before to really count as predicting anything. Though actually, if they predict it with more accuracy and say how common it is (so it's not just the one weird character being weird, but also not being anywhere close to everyone) that might be something as well.

Fair. (In _Diaspora_ many people are; in _Oceanic_, all.)

I vaguely remembered a short story where a person at a cocktail party had been a different gender the week before, although some people never changed. It might be:

> Robert Silverberg's Son of Man (1971), whose protagonist is transposed into the Far Future and there experiences a wide range of ways of being human, including being female...

See https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/transgender_sf for many entries before 1990, or even 1900.

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