Ah, that might well be the problem: I don't remember the Earthsea trilogy very well (despite reading it once as a kid and once as an adult).

Genitally essentialist feminism is frustrating because it seems so endemic to feminism of a particular time period, and one doesn't just want to discard everything. I mean, I could just ignore everything that isn't trans-affirming, but thinking about that leaves me feeling like I have no history, no species, not much to draw on, really. And yet the alternative is to read fiction that tells me that I'm fictitious. So yes, it's frustrating.