Preface: I'm a white-passing bisexual binary transgender woman. I have privilege that trans People of Color
do not have.
That’s the thing though. There could have been all sorts of lgtbqwtfbbq characters this whole time. But it wasn’t mentioned because no one cares about that in the future. What will be the point of telling us, the audience, and not mentioning it in the show? They’ll address it in some way. Imagine if someone had never seen this announcement. How would they know the characters are non-binary or whatever?
Barclay could have been transgender for all we know. Feel free to throw in any other character. There have always been non-binary and transgender characters in Star Trek.
Hey, saying 'lgtbqwtfbbq' is insulting, even if you might be one of those letters you're still mocking an acronym that includes people who might be even more marginalized than you.
The point is to give people who are marginalized in today's world inclusion in our media and normalization in the eyes of the public. What matters first and foremost is the message we send to the modern audience about who people are. Transgender and especially non-binary are poorly represented in mainstream media, such as Hollywood productions.
Many times we are portrayed by cis men or cis women on screen because of Hollywood's ingrained bigotry and transphobia toward us. I highly suggest watching the Netflix documentary
Disclosure to learn more about this.
The Barclay example doesn't work because casting cisgender actors as transgender characters is simply insulting. This is also in the case of casting cis queer people as trans characters. It's incredibly insulting when cisgay men like Matt Bomer play trans characters because it implies that cis women are just gay men who transition to be with men. That's not the case whatsoever.
The Outcast was for many years just a dreadfully hamfisted attempt to do a "gay" episode. It failed on many levels. Strangely, it works better now when you look at more through the perspective of gender. Hopefully we can do better than that now.
I don't think "The Outcast" really works even as a trans allegory. The actress is still cisgender and the character is still an alien. Some trans kids might think "Oh, this is sort of like me!" but they're also going to think "Am I just some sort of freak imaginary alien?"
Who cares what it is as long as the characters are well-written and acted? Stamets and Culber have been handled (IMO) superbly so far, so...
Trans and non-binary people care. It is so difficult not just to find respectful depictions of trans and enby characters but also those portrayed by actual trans and enby performers. As a woman who is trans I only just recently began to receive mainstream depiction in media, like Lavern Cox in Orange is the New Black (where she plays a woman who gets put through horrible shit), Nichole Main in Supergirl (where she gets cisplained by cis characters, told not to be angry when treated like dirt, depicted in a straight relationship with a fucking computer, and finally is actually a fucking alien instead of a Earthling human). I think Sense8 also has a trans woman playing a trans woman (to say nothing of being created by a trans woman) but I haven't gotten around to seeing it yet. Trans women (and trans men) still have a long, long way to go until we have complete control over our media depictions.
From
GLAAD:
"Since 2002, GLAAD catalogued 102 episodes and non-recurring storylines of scripted television that contained transgender characters, and found that 54% of those were categorized as containing negative representations at the time of their airing. An additional 35% were categorized at ranging from "problematic" to "good," while only 12% were considered groundbreaking, fair and accurate enough to earn a
GLAAD Media Award nomination."
I hope Grey isn't the new Dax. It's just too lazy.
I don't think it's lazy but I do think it's very problematic that the first trans character in a series run by a bunch of cis people is being portrayed as an alien, rather than a human from the planet Earth. Really goes to show that cis people shouldn't be given the keys to the car.
Some people don't get it.
