News Trans character announced

[XCV330]

There's been a scene of two characters brushing their teeth, you can do anything in a scene as long there is dialogue or something to continue the plot.

for some reason that remains one of my favorite season 1 scenes. its just very natural. it grounded the whole crew to reality in a way that is seldom done. These were real people, not uniforms. Ok.. they have pajama uniforms but if I had one I'd wear it too.

 

[Crazyewok]

There's been a scene of two characters brushing their teeth, you can do anything in a scene as long there is dialogue or something to continue the plot.

I guess your right. That would work.

 

[eschaton]

I consider the lack of trans people to be a weakness of those stories, a lot of science fiction tends to ignore gay and trans people with the exception of maybe using them as fetish material. These writers, who were almost always cis men, did not understand trans people and it shows. A truly realistic scifi future is going to include gay and trans people because we've always been here and we always will be here and wacky scifi tech isn't going to change that. You can rationalize and justify this all you want, but what you're describing is erasure and bordering on genocide.

Maybe Greg Egan is a better example. He's a well-known hard sci-fi author. He's private to a high degree - no pictures of him even exist on the web, but I'm pretty sure he's LGBT. I've read stories of his with a gay main character, a straight male protagonist who falls for someone who is enby (who has literally gender neutraled themselves), a future world where the male organ switches back and forth between individuals each time they have sex, stories where human minds are on chips and can swap bodies at will, a guy who has his inability to feel any pleasure whatsoever fixed via technological augmentation and suddenly finds himself attracted to everyone, etc.

Like, if you're saying "Haha, I'd totally change to a girl's body" as a supposed 'man' then I've got news for you honey.

I already said upthread that if we had access to far future tech where I could switch genders and then reverse back, I'd do so. Or more accurately, I'd do so if I didn't also have the complications of a family life. I don't feel any desire to actually present really as female- I'd certainly be a soft butch. But I would still find it an interesting experience to try.

I think most people are curious about what it's like to experience the opposite gender. It doesn't mean you're necessarily trans, any more than having a random adolescent encounter with your own gender (or like, finding someone of your own gender attractive once) automatically makes you bisexual.

 

[eschaton]

Wouldn't HRT in the Trekverse boil down to flashing a light over part of your body for 30 seconds?

 

[Awesome Possum]

Maybe Greg Egan is a better example. He's a well-known hard sci-fi author. He's private to a high degree - no pictures of him even exist on the web, but I'm pretty sure he's LGBT. I've read stories of his with a gay main character, a straight male protagonist who falls for someone who is enby (who has literally gender neutraled themselves), a future world where the male organ switches back and forth between individuals each time they have sex, stories where human minds are on chips and can swap bodies at will, a guy who has his inability to feel any pleasure whatsoever fixed via technological augmentation and suddenly finds himself attracted to everyone, etc.

That's probably just his sexual fantasy.

I already said upthread that if we had access to far future tech where I could switch genders and then reverse back, I'd do so. Or more accurately, I'd do so if I didn't also have the complications of a family life. I don't feel any desire to actually present really as female- I'd certainly be a soft butch. But I would still find it an interesting experience to try.

I think most people are curious about what it's like to experience the opposite gender. It doesn't mean you're necessarily trans, any more than having a random adolescent encounter with your own gender (or like, finding someone of your own gender attractive once) automatically makes you bisexual.

I don't think cis people think that way.

 

[Tuskin38]

Wouldn't HRT in the Trekverse boil down to flashing a light over part of your body for 30 seconds?

We never really saw what Bashir did to Quark. But I think it involved hormones?

I haven't watched that episode in a literal decade. Maybe longer.

 

[Crazyewok]

Wouldn't HRT in the Trekverse boil down to flashing a light over part of your body for 30 seconds?

Probably be hypospray as you are putting a substance into ones body.

Though I would think the technology would exist to make your own body stimulate the hormones naturally without the hassle of injections, patches or spray because regardless whwt sex you are born as, you have the ability to produce most hormones anyway.

 

[XCV330]

Post-human society won't look much like ours, and gender concepts common in a few hundred years would be probably as confusing to us as a Windows control panel functions to a stone age human.

 

[Tuskin38]

Post-human society won't look much like ours, and gender concepts common in a few hundred years would be probably as confusing to us as a Windows control panel functions to a stone age human.

Real life, sure, but the show is being made for modern humans to watch, so it needs to be understandable.

 

[XCV330]

Yes, but the show is being made for modern humans to watch, so it should still be recognizable.

oh I agree. and people will still be people, figuring out ways to put things into other things. things that make us happy will still make us sad. We don't listen to music about hitting our thumbs with hammers, its all about the heartache and the wanting. Wiping your memory now and then to experience thrills all over again might be a thing.

 

[Crazyewok]

figuring out ways to put things into other things. things that make us happy will still make us sad.

If only doctors could find away to make my body produce it's own opiates and THC..
Though right now I would just settle for my own body making it's own serotonin and melatonin.

 

[JulieYBM]

I already said upthread that if we had access to far future tech where I could switch genders and then reverse back, I'd do so. Or more accurately, I'd do so if I didn't also have the complications of a family life. I don't feel any desire to actually present really as female- I'd certainly be a soft butch. But I would still find it an interesting experience to try.

I think most people are curious about what it's like to experience the opposite gender. It doesn't mean you're necessarily trans, any more than having a random adolescent encounter with your own gender (or like, finding someone of your own gender attractive once) automatically makes you bisexual.

Not to go around telling you what to do with your body but soft-butch is a thing trans women do all the time. I mean, hell, I normally wear a graphic tee and shorts from the men's section (although women's clothing gives me extra euphoria). Trans lesbians are totally a thing, too. A lot of the accounts I follow on Twitter usually have that aesthetic going for them, too.

Discussions like this always remind me of how funny I was in 2017. "Wow, I sure would be a girl if I could have a guy's kid but I totally don't like guys or kids!" "Wow, am I attracted to her or just jealous of how she looks pregnant?" "Ahaha, but I didn't know as a child so I totally can't be trans!" "I'm an ugly balding man and will never look like the kind of girl I wished I looked like lol" Then 2018 Julie: "Wait, you mean hormones can do THAT? Uh..."

 

[eschaton]

I don't think cis people think that way.

I mean, I've also fantasized in an idle manner since I was a child about having wings so that I could fly (preferably bat/pterosaur style wings made of skin, I'm not into the idea of bird wings). I'm just not particularly attached to the current physical form of my body period. I'm not into Cartesian dualism, but I tend to think of myself as being a mind/ordered information system that just happens to inhabit this particular shell - which I have no real emotional attachment to. I'd happily switch to something else in order to experience life in a different manner. The most important part to me is the internal continuity of mental selfhood, everything else is fungible.

 

[SJGardner]

The main problem with speculation about gender reassignment, or gender in general in the future is that Star Trek is not a scientific study in futurology. It is a story made today, for people living today, about issues and topics that are a matter of public discussion today. Marginalized people want representation today, not listening to privileged writers handwaving their existence away and declaring it utopia. Whether they speculate that being trans will be meaningless because people could just change their biological sex whenever they want to or that there won't be trans people because their bodies will be genetically engineered to match their gender and they'd be anatomically indistinguishable from cis people, it doesn't matter. Both trivialize the issues, struggles and existence of a marginalized group who are fed up with being used as props in whatever wish fulfillment fantasy the writer is creating. These kinds of fantasies, especially the latter one, have the very unpalatable implication that the problems of gender- and sexual minorities won't be solved by society accepting them as normal members of a diverse humanity, but rather by "curing" them and making them "normal."

Speculation about the future is not an exact science. It's more like creative writing. Different people will make different speculations, so arguing that X will be so and so in the future, or that a creative choice in a piece of speculative fiction is unrealistic/unscientific, is entirely meaningless. It's not the writer's job to calculate and extrapolate how society and technology will look hundreds of years from now. It's not even their job to make a story scientifically accurate according to our current understanding of it. Their job is to make a story that engages an audience living today.

 

[RandyS]

Going to be interesting if he we scenes of new characters taking HRT. Good ol' medicine montages are the best.

They could just have the characters walk into sickbay and say, "I'm here for my treatment Doc." And let it go at that. No need for a montage.

 

[JulieYBM]

They could just have the characters walk into sickbay and say, "I'm here for my treatment Doc." And let it go at that. No need for a montage.

There's no need for anything, it's just a web series. Taking HRT, though? That's a pretty special process for trans people a lot of the time. Subtly is a tool, not the default. Some things you need to be loud about, to tell the naysayers to go fuck themselves because you are strong and winning.

 

[eschaton]

The main problem with speculation about gender reassignment, or gender in general in the future is that Star Trek is not a scientific study in futurology. It is a story made today, for people living today, about issues and topics that are a matter of public discussion today. Marginalized people want representation today, not listening to privileged writers handwaving their existence away and declaring it utopia. Whether they speculate that being trans will be meaningless because people could just change their biological sex whenever they want to or that there won't be trans people because their bodies will be genetically engineered to match their gender and they'd be anatomically indistinguishable from cis people, it doesn't matter. Both trivialize the issues, struggles and existence of a marginalized group who are fed up with being used as props in whatever wish fulfillment fantasy the writer is creating. These kinds of fantasies, especially the latter one, have the very unpalatable implication that the problems of gender- and sexual minorities won't be solved by society accepting them as normal members of a diverse humanity, but rather by "curing" them and making them "normal."

Speculation about the future is not an exact science. It's more like creative writing. Different people will make different speculations, so arguing that X will be so and so in the future, or that a creative choice in a piece of speculative fiction is unrealistic/unscientific, is entirely meaningless. It's not the writer's job to calculate and extrapolate how society and technology will look hundreds of years from now. It's not even their job to make a story scientifically accurate according to our current understanding of it. Their job is to make a story that engages an audience living today.

I understand what you mean here. But honestly when series don't think through their worldbuilding, it kinda irks me.

Let me give you a different example in Trek, one related to race.

Star Trek is a post-racist society, at least when it comes to humanity. Black, white, Asian - it has no particular salience any longer. We have seen interracial relationships almost from the beginning of Star Trek. Yet we don't see the obvious conclusion of this, which is interracial people. There are more human-alien hybrids in Trek than there are interracial people. Hell, when they discover random-ass isolated colonies with a few thousand people settled centuries before, we see black people and white people, rather than a bunch of ambiguously brown people. I would personally find a Trek where there were almost no white people (or black people, etc) to be more interesting, because it would let us see the positive ramifications of inclusivity over the longer run as many different strands of human culture blend together.

Also, there are simply some stories which aren't appropriate for Star Trek, period, even if they speak to issues in public discussion today. For example, a big part of being a woman in modern culture is dealing with harrassment at some point in your life, but it would entirely break with (post TOS) Star Trek to see a female Starfleet officer having to deal with their commanding officer being a generalized creep. There are sci-fi settings where this works of course, but it has no place in Star Trek (unless it's being done by a non-Starfleet officer, like Quark).

 

[Crazyewok]

I For example, a big part of being a woman in modern culture is dealing with harrassment at some point in your life, but it would entirely break with (post TOS) Star Trek to see a female Starfleet officer having to deal with their commanding officer being a generalized creep.

You havent seen Rikers and Kirk's HR files and LaForge...

 

[Lord Garth]

Too often I see "We don't need to show... " or "We don't need to have... " and I keep thinking back "The Measure of a Man". "I do not need them. I want them."

 

[SJGardner]

I understand what you mean here. But honestly when series don't think through their worldbuilding, it kinda irks me.

In my opinion, the constructed world being internally consistent and having both depth and breadth should be more important than scientific or historical accuracy. Generally, a writer doesn't need to develop parts of the universe they don't want to utilize. But if they want to include concepts in a constructed world that relate to an IRL marginalized group, then they should make an effort to actually include that marginalized group in their world, and to do it in a respectful way. I'm not talking about restricting creative freedoms, but if one writes about an issue connected to a minority, then they should be prepared for increased scrutiny of their work from that minority.

Let me give you a different example in Trek, one related to race.

Again, I feel it should generally fall on the writer to decide whether to delve into the ethnic makeup of future society. It's more of a question of "want to have" than "need to have." Of course, ethnicity is not the only problem that Star Trek has glossed over regarding those small colonies of mere hundreds of people... other than Up The Long Ladder, they never considered how a genetic bottleneck would affect their diversity as far as I know.

Also, there are simply some stories which aren't appropriate for Star Trek, period, even if they speak to issues in public discussion today. For example, a big part of being a woman in modern culture is dealing with harrassment at some point in your life, but it would entirely break with (post TOS) Star Trek to see a female Starfleet officer having to deal with their commanding officer being a generalized creep. There are sci-fi settings where this works of course, but it has no place in Star Trek (unless it's being done by a non-Starfleet officer, like Quark).

The kind of representation we're talking about in Star Trek is mainly people who are currently marginalized wanting to see stories where they are accepted by society as perfectly normal, which is Star Trek, at least in theory, should be perfect for. As a white cishet man, I'm not the one whose opinion should matter on this, but I wouldn't find a story about a homophobic or transphobic Starfleet officer appropriate for the setting either.