Pre-2009 Star Trek and LGBTQI+ representation: simple disinterest or active hostility?
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No.
They are a very small percentage of the population, and at no point was anything said thst excluded those people. "Humanity" being used as a general term, universally understood in such a context.
That's a ridiculous, bad faith argument and you know it.
The point of the matter was the obviously incorrect acronym used above was inappropriate at best and completely offensive at worst.
Yeah. That's not cool.
I stick to LGBT just for brevitys sake. After the T tends change around in some people's preferences and I don't really care enough to stay on top of what the lastest verbiage is. I actively don't want to offend anyone, so I keep it in the simple form.
I use LGBTQ because that's what comes up in my auto-complete/correct (a two-edged sword if ever there was one). But I agree with keeping it simple. You only need to look on Wikipedia to know that there are many types of genderqueer, and you can't really include them all without making alphabet soup.
What? It most certainly is not. Definitions of “homophobia” include “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or gay people” (see Merriam-Webster), “harmful or unfair things a person does based on a fear or dislike of gay people or queer people” (via the Cambridge Dictionary) and “culturally produced fear of or prejudice against homosexuals” (from the Encyclopedia Britannica). Your definition of “using a word properly” doesn't make sense, because people almost universally use the term “homophobia” to mean “bigotry against homosexuals” and almost never to literally refer to “fear of homosexuals”. A word doesn’t always continue to mean what it originally meant. That’s just not how language works.
Of course I want her to sound like a real person! Real in the sense that she’s believable within the reality of the story in which she appears. Real absolutely doesn't mean here that she has to sound like the most common denominator representative of an early 90s television audience and should be mirroring their opinions and prejudices. The argument that you want to make, that her basically saying “I’m so sorry, but I’m personally not attracted to women.” would prevent her from sounding like a real person on a starship in the far future isn’t convincing to me. She can sound like a real person and say something that’s more intellectually challenging to the expectations and norms of an average 90s audience — they are not mutually exclusive.
She’s in fact speaking so “clearly” that this scene went totally unnoticed by the audience during its original airing and ever since. There’s no people anywhere who have been talking about the way Beverly is telling Odan off and how it sounds a bit iffy, that’s how “clearly” she’s speaking only about herself and not humans in general. Right.
“[It] would only hurt the emotional tone of the scene by pulling the audience out of the emotional moment to make a point about it being ok to be gay.”
— And yet they’ve written her dialog to make a point of it being a “human failing” to not continue the relationship when the partner suddenly presents as the opposite sex. “Perhaps one day our ability to love won’t be so limited.” — Yeah, wouldn't that be nice, Beverly? If there were only people who would be able to do that. But no, sadly there just aren’t.
In which case it would be between 12 or 69 people identifying as LGBTQ+ in a crew of a thousand, no? Not 6 or 7.
No, I just disagree with this. A more aesthetically worded version of "Oh sorry, i'm not gay but it's ok to be if someone else is." would have been infinitely more powerful, thought-provoking, challenging and progressive than what we got.
But it wasn't just that. That's the problem that's being missed in the zeal over making sure everything gets the LGBT-seal of approval. It 100% WAS NOT only that Odan was a woman now. It was that Odan had been several people in the span that Crusher had known him. That was just the icing on the cake.
To make it entirely an LGBT issue is missing the entire point of the episode.
Bad math. You're right.
It also is entirely irrelevant. Crusher is not LGBT. That is not her experience. She may know people. That doesn't change her own personal experience. She could be the only straight woman on the ship and it still changes nothing.
I guess that's where i'll just leave this, because I disagree in the opposite direction. That would make an absolute dud of an ending and rip much of the emotional weight from the entire episode, for the sole purpose of appeasing a small group of people who will overanalyze the dialogue 30 years later.
I'm going to go ahead and agree to disagree here, I don't think there is anything much more to be said. Glad to have had the discussion. Love getting different perspectives.
Don't do this please. Use one of the real acronyms.
Especially since if you go by the original Latin, "homo" means "man", hence our species name. So, homophobia would be simply mean "fear of men".
I actually thought that this was what was being mocked by the QWERTY thing, the ever-changing acronym and flag. Personally I thought it kind of funny and I say that as someone represented by the B.
Ok, for the sake of argument let's imagine that Beverly had been bisexual, a perfect 3 on the Kinsey scale. That when she turned smiling waiting for Odan's third guest she continued to smile after seeing her.
Would this have made her? Some mystical being who had mysteriously managed to overcome the insurmountable limits of "human failing" centuries, if not millennia in advance, or simply a person whose sexual orientation fortunately suited the situation?
I'll say it one more time, because i've said it a few times already, i'll package it slightly different this time.
To answer the direct question, Bi Crusher may or may not still answer it the same way. The issue was not entirely "Odan is a woman now", it's "Odan keeps changing people, and now he turned into something incompatible". Bi Crusher may have found it easier to adjust, but given that even when Odan had taken Riker as a host she was already having issues dealing with it, it may be the same exact answer.
But, if she didn't care and the issue was entirely, 100% the "gay" issue then... her experience would be different, given her sexual orientation, and she probably would not answer it the same way, being a part of the small percentage of the population who would be compatible.
Another person not in that with that same experience may well likely say "humanity...", since the overwhelming majority of humans are heteronormative and that would be that persons experience, but since that term is used in context of a generalization, also in absolutely no way whatseover invalidates any human who may be able to love in such a way.
I don't know how many different ways I can say it. So. There ya go.
tl;dr just to bring it home, "humanity" does not literally mean every single possible individual who lived, lived or ever will live while specifically stating that anyone who does not fall under the generalization is in some way inhuman or nonexistant.
I'm tired, boss.
I wish more people were like you.
I also appreciate the mockery, but I understand such things are often done/said in a deragatory manner making fun of the people themselves, not the situation of "LGBT-Idontknowwhatotherletterstousebecausetheresomanynow".
I wouldn't write that myself. But I can appreciate the humor in it.
EDIT -
I wanted to add one last thing that I think making Crusher say "i'm not gay sorry" or thereabouts would not work.
The point is that she loves Odan, the "spirit" inside the shell. She loves the mind, the personality, etc. of the consciousness of Odan.
Crusher was hoping that one day, humanity could love beyond the physical shell, to not even see it. The only thing that matters is the essence of the person.
Are there some people who could? I'm sure. But now you're talking a percent of a percent.
Her specifically calling out an LGBT issue could almost be ANTI-LGBT in a way... she's saying that the physical body shouldn't matter. It's a limitation of humans that it does. And that's true, unless you're saying that lesbians should just look past, and date cis men because it's what's inside that counts, and gay men should date cis women because the physical body shouldn't matter...
No. That's just not the case, that's not human nature. The body does matter, in some way. Differently to different people, but it does. It matters. It's human.
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With the ending of “The Host,” I think it’s trying to serve multiple masters and ends up muddled.
It comes off as Beverly reinforcing heterosexual norms, which probably pleased the suits at Paramount, but if I’m being kind to the writers and producers, maybe the intent was to use the different kinds of love that a Trill can experience in different forms is meant to be an allegory for homosexuality or even trans relationships.
So when Beverly is apologizing for humanity not being open minded enough yet to understand relationships among Trill symbionts, another way of interpreting it is that maybe it was a way of calling out how limited the audience’s own view of love is/was.
I definitely do think the tone is weird in that scene, since I don’t exactly get that Beverly is “icked” out by the idea that Odan is a woman now. To me, it comes off more as disappointment than disgust. If you take Beverly at her word, I think there’s a way to see it where she sincerely regrets that she’s hung up on the exterior in order to be able to love the “person” who she fell for when Odan was male, since at least with this version of the Trill it was the same person just in a different shell (i.e., DS9 changes it later to where each new host brings something different to the union, so Odan would NOT be the same person she fell in love with, and the relationship would be taboo according to Trill custom).
It comes off as Beverly reinforcing heterosexual norms, which probably pleased the suits at Paramount, but if I’m being kind to the writers and producers, maybe the intent was to use the different kinds of love that a Trill can experience in different forms is meant to be an allegory for homosexuality or even trans relationships.
So when Beverly is apologizing for humanity not being open minded enough yet to understand relationships among Trill symbionts, another way of interpreting it is that maybe it was a way of calling out how limited the audience’s own view of love is/was.
I definitely do think the tone is weird in that scene, since I don’t exactly get that Beverly is “icked” out by the idea that Odan is a woman now. To me, it comes off more as disappointment than disgust. If you take Beverly at her word, I think there’s a way to see it where she sincerely regrets that she’s hung up on the exterior in order to be able to love the “person” who she fell for when Odan was male, since at least with this version of the Trill it was the same person just in a different shell (i.e., DS9 changes it later to where each new host brings something different to the union, so Odan would NOT be the same person she fell in love with, and the relationship would be taboo according to Trill custom).
It would have made her the network suits' worst nightmare.
Well said. "The Outcast" did the same thing, trying to be neither here nor there.
Yeah, but remember, this was before they had even established that Trills had spots instead of forehead bumps.
The homo in homosexual is derived from greek and means "same" or "identical" as opposed to hetero which means "different" or "other". Homo in homo sapiens is derived from latin where it means "man", it can be confusing but homophobia as a greek word doesn't mean "fear of man"
Yep. It's like "homogeneous", "homophone" or "homozygote".
I wondered why that was.
Indeed, I believe the correct form would be andropbobia? (the feminine equivalent is gyno/gynephobia).
As long as everyone is being pedantic, homophobia is a word coined by psychologist George Weinberg in the 1960s and isn't Greek at all, just made from Greek morphemes jammed together.
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