Cool. I also couldn't help reading Key as female. My hypothesis would be that people generally have a hard time writing characters of the opposite sex. Your gender may have leaked in. The Spivak pronouns were initially very distracting but were okay after a couple paragraphs. If you decide to change it Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns. But that might not work in a short story without exposition.
Le Guin pretty successfully wrote a whole planet of androgyns using masculine pronouns.
In Left Hand of Darkness, the narrator is an offplanet visitor and the only real male in the setting. He starts his tale by explicitly admitting he can't understand or accept the locals' sexual selves (they become male or female for short periods of time, a bit like estrus). He has to psychologically assign them sexes, but he can't handle a female-only society, so he treats them all as males. There are plot points where he fails to respond appropriately to the explici...
ITT we talk about whatever.