Yeah, I always thought that the use of masculine pronouns in that book was a totally valid choice, because we're not just getting a story about a genderless society, we're getting a story about that society as seen through the eyes of someone from a society more like ours. Ai's issues in dealing with the Gethenians are an equally important aspect of the book. It's easier for him to assign male terms to people who are acting in "masculine" roles than for him to examine his own assumptions about gender.

This partly all came up for me because I'm working on a fic-challenge thing, and one of the prompts is "mpreg" which is something I really have no interest in writing. But then I thought "what if you screwed with the timeline (and the biology!) a little, and Estraven got pregnant, and Genly had to figure out how to deal with that?" Haven't written it yet, but I might.

I think I read that second story, a really long time ago. I need to re-read it!