To boldly go

[Gottalife]

Trans on StarTrek. Yippee.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54012463

It didn't take long in the series for Kira to accept that Sisko (the American human) Knows Best, did it?

@langclegflavoredbananamush

It didn't take long in the series for Kira to accept that Sisko (the American human) Knows Best, did it?

In that case, at least in part because she also gave credence to him being the Emissary. Dax, otoh, was on a different footing - though perhaps too much of her character seemed dependent not just on being a venerable Trill but specifically the "old man" who'd learned Klingon martial techniques etc.

I've only just recently finished a re-watch of TNG (stands up just fine). Perhaps it's time for DS9 again.

Don't think I can do Voyager. Too many of the characters wind me up (although not the one most expect - I like Janeway)

Dax, otoh, was on a different footing - though perhaps too much of her character seemed dependent not just on being a venerable Trill but specifically the "old man" who'd learned Klingon martial techniques etc.

I agree. I thought he concept of her character had more potential than it delivered, what with having had several lifetimes as men and women, but it was mostly focused on the one "old man" while her mentioning her past lives as women often took the form of things like comments about it taking longer to get ready or enjoying the extra attention as a woman. There were a lot of episodes of DS9 that passed the Bechdel test thanks to Kira and Dax, though they did talk about men a fair bit.

Michael Burnham gets on my last nerve. I know she was brought up with Vulcans but Jesus Christ on a crumpet. Tilly, Jett & Georgiou are much better. Bloody love Tilly.

Voyager is an interesting one because they were trying to be woke and progressive by including Chakotay, a Native American character, but they fucked it up by consulting with Jamake Highwater, a conman who was actually a white bloke pretending to be Native so he could sell a load of bullshit he'd made up, claiming to be progressive and empowering, and the character ended up being a racist stereotype. It sounds as if, with all this gender woo and listening to organisations that hawk this rubbish, they're making the same mistake again.

Meh, not seeing the issue at all. Its a bit annoying smetimes though when its all 'omg, look how progressive we are' fanfares rather than just..introducing the character spontaneously and not having a huge fuss, but besides that I don't see an issue at all tbh. Star trek is not something I have ever had even a slight bit of interest in though for some reason..I tend to like sci fi stuff too so its weird.

About Star Trek having a trans person and a non binary person too?
I saw an article on this earlier.
Thoughts went along "cool" and "shows diversity" and "we don't all have to be the same"
So basically yeah, think it's a good thing to show a range of people!

We have already had MTF Dr Who - so surely this is a bit yesterday

WTF, lol - Dr Who had Dr Who regenerating into a female, so that means trans gender and non binary is covered too, it's soooo yesterday?
How does that even work

@SpaceOP

Well, I'd like to see how it's handled before I get upset or excited. Does the trans character think that they get to trample over the rights of the female characters, for example.

Discovery is great imo, and I doubt it will be a trans character demanding womens rights or threatening to attack the women or insisting that 5 year olds are trans. It will just be Star Trek. I'll wait and see too. They are a Trill who often change sex when the host dies. No Biggie.

WTF, lol - Dr Who had Dr Who regenerating into a female, so that means trans gender and non binary is covered too, it's soooo yesterday? How does that even work

We already have transgender characters in science fiction TV series. The BBC reporting that yet another transgender character is being created as if it is so novel is nonsense. This is not new or news.

@Suffrajester

Voyager is an interesting one because they were trying to be woke and progressive by including Chakotay, a Native American character, but they fucked it up by consulting with Jamake Highwater, a conman who was actually a white bloke pretending to be Native so he could sell a load of bullshit he'd made up, claiming to be progressive and empowering, and the character ended up being a racist stereotype. It sounds as if, with all this gender woo and listening to organisations that hawk this rubbish, they're making the same mistake again.

I had no idea about that.

Anyway, whose to say that loads of characters in the past weren’t trans, they just didn’t mention it.

Was it Star Trek or Dr Who who fired a (gay,male) writer for hateful thought/ideas?

I don't think the Doctor in Doctor Who or the Trills are really trans though are they? The Doctor's a sequential hermaphrodite, like a clownfish(!) or frog in that she has literally changed sex. And the Trills are a symbiosis between a symbiote slug-shaped thing and a humanoid host that can be of either sex and the symbiote will often join with multiple hosts in their lifetime and those hosts can be either sex. Jadzia and Ezri were female, Curzon was male, Dax the symbiote is whatever sex Dax is, if symbiotes are even sexually dimorphic. The closest thing to trans would be Quark in that awful "Profit and Lace" episode someone mentioned, or the J'naii that felt they should've been female, though how a species that's all one sex even develops a notion of sexual dimorphism much less a desire to be one sex or the other, I don't know. Contact with sexually dimorphic aliens maybe, or observation of other species on their planet?

Which Ian M Banks is it where the characters change sex?

Which Ian M Banks is it where the characters change sex?

More than one, I think, but it's particularly mentioned in the player of games because the aliens that the player visits have 3 sexes and the player himself is unusual in never having changed sex.

@TreestumpsAndTrampolines

What a wierd thing to say - Next Gen, DS9, Enterprise, and probably TOS (although I can't think who offhand) have had races which required 1, 2 or 3 sexes to reproduce, or who had 'evolved beyond' sexual reproduction and were asexual.

Can't see what's so special here at all.

This.

But maybe they’ve only observed a bit of Star Trek before and just feel like they know all about it.

As an ancient Trekker who was addicted to the original series when it first aired in the 1960’s, I’m unimpressed by this rather pathetic jumping on the woke bandwagon, and virtue signalling, of the new series.
The original was far more controversial and ground breaking, with the first interracial kiss on US tv, and a pilot episode with a female first officer at a time when the southern US still had apartheid (the Jim Crow laws) and women were still denied equal pay. The show had to fight the censors to get shown at all.

It's a shame they couldn't keep Number One though if they'd kept her character as it was in the pilot then they wouldn't have developed Spock in the same way and that's too awful to contemplate really.

@ChesterDrawsDoesntExist

Clearly not a Trekkie then eh?

It's okay. You tried.

Star Fleet Characters have been boldly going into non-binary Aliens pants for decades now.

This Comment wins the weekend for me! 😂😂😂

The Doctor's a sequential hermaphrodite, like a clownfish(!) or frog in that she has literally changed sex.

Have’t we heard about clownfish in this whole debate before and often??!!! I think you are on to something..!

Hardly surprising when Star Trek was the original multicultural /diversitity show, a generation ahead of other shows. Kirk and OHoura's kiss was one of the first interracial kisses on US TV

Indeed, Errol - Spock would just have been the science officer, and probably a fairly background character. And it’s unlikely they’d have developed the Vulcans as emotionally repressed and dedicated to logic, if they already had Number One filling that niche.
I’d have been most miffed- I’ve had a crush on Spock for over 50 years!