I am currently a backer for the Kickstarter magazine WOMEN DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION. As a part of the reward to backers, Lightspeed magazine is publishing essays to the Kickstarter community by various authors about discovering more-than-male-gender in speculative fiction, and how, and why. Compliments of the ever-prolific Seanan McGuire, I subscribed, and now know more about the gendered histories of the authors than I expected to ever learn.

I highly recommend the post from Kameron Hurley, "'We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative" on her web site. It's not a particularly cohesive essay, but it illuminates and personalizes the gender assumptions we make in vocabulary and historical reference.