5 is a number that falls between 1 and 300. So is 1. And how many people in the us are tardigrades, klingons, genetically engineered, orphaned by terrorist attacks, etc?
News Martin-Green: Star Trek And Diversity
- Thread starter AutoAdmin
- Start date
- Status
5 is a number that falls between 1 and 300. So is 1. And how many people in the us are tardigrades, klingons, genetically engineered, orphaned by terrorist attacks, etc?
When fiction doesn't reflect real life 1:1 it's fine, too. The creators of Discovery don't need to justify their casting decisions to the "there's too much diversity" whiners in any case.
TOS had seven characters, TNG had nine, DS9 had nine, Voyager had nine, Enterprise had seven, Discovery five. So that's 46 main characters in Trek. The guest characters likely number in the hundreds. Plenty of room for plenty of diversity.
After seven hundred hours, diversity is really all Star Trek has left to explore. There is no plot they can do that is "original".
How is it a "straw man argument" if she quoted you directly comparing being transgender to having a birth defect, one which you said the Federation would have eliminated? Nor did she say anything about preventing trans people from getting SRS, so ironically the only straw man was your own.
I don't know how many people here are aware that Awesome Possum is transgender herself, but I feel as if there have been enough debates on the subject in threads in this forum over the past year and she has mentioned it enough in those threads that it should be fairly common knowledge, and yet people still seem to go out of their way to continue to talk down to her about it or prod her about it seemingly in the hopes of provoking a negative reaction. I hope that's not the case and it's just a matter of ignorance about the subject, but given some of the ridiculous reactions to any mention of diversity around here it makes me suspicious to say the least.
Regardless, talking down to her with the "little one" crap, referring to being transgender as a birth defect in need of correcting, and misrepresenting her arguments are enough to earn you an infraction for trolling. Comments to PM.
In the future, when dealing with any subject involving a person's identity, one should learn to tread lightly and make sure they're not talking down to a member of that community or speculating about how in the bright future of Star Trek people like them will have been eliminated from existence.
Statistically speaking, how many people in the US are androids, aliens, sapient holograms, former cyborg zombies, telepaths, or child geniuses who can freeze time and travel thousands of light years in seconds? So why the sudden requirement for ultra-realistic proportionality when it comes to depicting transgender people, or greater human diversity in general?
Having proportional representation in a cast is a good baseline to strive for when a traditionally large population is woefully underrepresented in casting, like how the Asian continent represents 60% of the world's population but rarely ever represents 3/5ths of the main characters of a cast, like the five main cast members on Discovery you mention above. India and China alone account for more than a third of the world population, yet show up so disproportionally in Trek that fans concoct squicky theories about how they were largely wiped out in WWIII to explain it. And don't tell me Indian and Chinese descent/nationality actors can't be found around Los Angeles or New York or Vancouver or Toronto.
But that doesn't mean relatively small minority groups should be left by the wayside in the meantime, especially if they are part of a group that is the subject of major ongoing public discrimination and hostility of the type that would most benefit from having positive role models onscreen both to give young people like them someone to admire and strive for, and to give people who have led a more insular life or one clouded by bigotry an opportunity to be exposed to someone they wouldn't normally interact with in their everyday lives.
Transgender people have become the latest target (it didn't just start recently, but it's ramped of as of late) of bigoted exploitation designed to motivate a base of insular people to political action with fear of the "unknown", like the false idea that they're hanging out in bathrooms waiting to prey on your children. If Star Trek was as forward thinking as it likes to claim to be, it would be on the leading edge of combating this bigotry and ignorance with positive transgender role models. Hopefully they won't wait as long to acknowledge trans people as they did to acknowledge gays. There's actually still an opportunity to sort of be out front with a positive transgender character actually played by a transgender actor if they took the chance instead of playing it safe and waiting until it's old hat in TV shows.
C'mon! You act like Star Trek and its fans have spent the last fifty years patting themselves on the back for its diversity!
In the world 1 in 25 people are American citizens. There are 5 main characters in discovery.
I didn't see anything wrong in that post. If you actually ever came down on possum's trolling you'd have credibility - a it is, you just don't.
Just my opinion and I'm not going to defend it so conserve the your energy.
I think the difference between using fictional science to deal with Transgender people runs into the issue more about how it reflects modern society. If someone is born who identifies as a woman but is born in a male body wouldn't someone prefer that science could make it so that person was born in a female body from the start just to prevent future discrimination or surgeries to get a body that more represents who they are?. Are we saying the bigotry they face and society hangups are key things that go into being transgender or is being born in body that you don't identify with a important thing to being transgender that must be preserved? I think someone who is transgender can answer that better.
The more important thing though from fiction though is that even if science could do this you loose the modern metaphor for what transgender people in the present day have to face because that tech doesn't exist in the real world. I think you might could have characters casually talk about how they went through surgery and not have it be a bid deal which would be in line with the utopia people are supose to be living in. You could have them deal with bigotry from a backward human like the Styles guy in "Balance of Terror" or the first officer to Data in "Redemption" or you could just have aliens who are bigoted to that kind of thing. Something tells me the Klingons are not that open to these kinds of things.
Jason
The more important thing though from fiction though is that even if science could do this you loose the modern metaphor for what transgender people in the present day have to face because that tech doesn't exist in the real world. I think you might could have characters casually talk about how they went through surgery and not have it be a bid deal which would be in line with the utopia people are supose to be living in. You could have them deal with bigotry from a backward human like the Styles guy in "Balance of Terror" or the first officer to Data in "Redemption" or you could just have aliens who are bigoted to that kind of thing. Something tells me the Klingons are not that open to these kinds of things.
Jason
If you want to criticize moderator actions, there's a proper way to do that. Contact the mod in question, don't derail the thread by discussing mod actions.
Also feel free to report trolling instead of whining about it in thread. Accusing a fellow poster of trolling in public isn't okay on this site. There's a report button for a reason. You can also contact a moderator.
So if you accuse people of trolling again, expect an infraction.
Comments to PM.
One interesting point to consider is that full funding of STD was made possible through Netflix international sales. Given that, we may see more modifications in the show given cultural differences among that international audience, similar to what has been taking place for expensive Hollywood movies.
That would be great. Someone posted a thread here not too long ago about the lack of diversity among nationalities. I thought it was a fair criticism. Starfleet is not only supposed to represent all of the Federation but all of Earth as well. It is a perhaps unfortunate trait of humans that we tend to be more interested in viewing shows and movies that have at least some actors who look like us physically or cultrurally, but it is what it is.
IDIC, yall, regardless of the reasons.
Last edited:
It's fine if you don't "need" it, but the audience in their millions probably includes people who do. Representation is about more than dragging the lumpen populace by the nose to certain conclusions, it's about giving voice to people who haven't had opportunities to use the megaphone of popular media. I don't "need" Star Trek to inculcate me in the notion that LGBT people can have meaningful relationships, but if I were a gay teenager and my particular corner of the world didn't have a lot of out gay people who could serve as examples, the relationship between Stamets and Culber could give a powerful message about the possibilities open to me that I might not be getting from my teachers, my peers, or my parents.
It is not at all unfortunate that people from the LGBT-community and racial and ethnic minorities of a given country would wish to be represented in fiction.
For all I care they can replace the entire Discovery cast with the cast of Sense8 next season. 
For all I care they can replace the entire Discovery cast with the cast of Sense8 next season.
I'd probably keep Isaacs and Rapp. If they replaced the rest, I wouldn't be broken hearted.
Because while it sounds good, thanks to longstanding systemic biases favoring certain groups and disfavoring others—both within the casting process itself and outside of it—this doesn't lead to anything approaching equal and/or fair representation on its own. There are too many pre-existing disparities in the system and surrounding society for it all to just work itself out by itself without making a concerted effort to actively counter them.
Not that it diminishes your actual point in the slightest, but just to be accurate, we first learned about Kirk's brother earlier in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (TOS).
Gender identity, whatever form it may take in a given individual's case—fluid, non-binary, and questioning varieties included—is too important and central an aspect of one's character to just be retroactively imposed later as an afterthought. (By which I mean in no way to suggest that it should be fixated upon or portrayed as being of prime significance above or to the exclusion of all others when it comes to any particular character, just that the approach to writing characters in general shouldn't be: "whatever, it doesn't matter, leave it undefined and we'll decide later.") Doing that with sexual orientation, while probably not ideal either, can at least potentially be less problematic, because that aspect can more plausibly not come up until a situation calls for one character to show romantic and/or sexual attraction/interest/partnership—or the lack thereof—toward another. (Not to say that it can't or shouldn't come up outside of that context, and not to minimize the importance of diversity being openly and visibly represented on that front, either.) But concepts of gender exert an influence far beyond just the arena of sexuality. (Again though, not that they "rule" or control everything about a person, naturally.)
You're ignoring other potential "realities of the setting," such as the possibility that such traits might well not be viewed as a "problem" to be "corrected" at all. In a society where everyone were more accepted by, and accepting of, themselves and others as they are, each with their own unique body, free to define their own individual identity as they please, instead of one that assigns and enforces particular "norms" or "roles" to delineated "types" within a limited set of defined genders, there might well be a far lessened sense of "dysphoria" among those who now experience it. The biochemistry remaining the same, might the psychology and sociology not evolve to better harmonize with the fact of it? Might not whatever "illness" may arise out of being trans have far less to do with genetics than it does with being made to feel one isn't in the "correct" body/mind with respect to society's expectations of how those two elements are "supposed" to go together, in contrast to one's own internal concept and image of self? To the extent that it's a "problem" for people today, might this not be largely because we make it into one?
Granted, Trek has a long way to go toward actually portraying such a hypothetical future where the above concerns aren't still in play—much as it has with respect to other forms of diversity—but the idea of somehow systematically engineering such a "condition" out in the womb seems to me even more out of line with what has been portrayed. (To say nothing of the pseudo-genocidal undertones in such a suggestion!) Bashir's severe learning disability pointedly didn't count as one of the "serious birth defects" that exceptions to the ban on genetic tinkering could be made for. What reason is there to think this would?
I never quite understand what point people are trying to make when they mention this. That a certain demographic exists in proportionally small numbers within society at large can often be one reason which leads to them being underrepresented and misunderstood in the broader conversation and cultural narrative in the first place. So in spite of how it's usually intended, this is actually an argument for why in such cases statistically disproportionate over-representation in media is actually more fair to these groups, because statistically proportionate representation just leads to them remaining marginalized. (Of course, there can also be many factors other than lack of sheer numbers that go into a subset of the population being marginalized, as well. Just look at institutionalized slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration, for instance.)
Whatever the majority or perceived "default" (the two don't always coincide) may be in a given context, it's often that which deviates (in the non-pejorative sense) from it which deserves further exploration and examination over retreading the same all-too-familiar ground. I hope my use of the following analogy doesn't read as overly paternalistic or dehumanizing to trans people, as I fear it could even as I type it, but think about endangered species; the fact that their representatives are relatively few in absolute number is precisely what makes them so vulnerable as groups, and exactly why they need active protection from threats in order to not disappear completely. And the more attention is directed toward and focused on them (and the threats they face), the more likely it is that they will receive such protection.
(I debated with myself overnight about whether to post this or not. Apologies to @Awesome Possum and anyone else if any of these comments are off the mark or otherwise go amiss. I don't mean to lecture or "mansplain" here, but perhaps in my clumsiness and/or lack of complete understanding I am nonetheless guilty of it. I am certainly open to being further educated on the subject, as no doubt we could all stand to be.)
-MMoM
Last edited:
Looks like I have to rewatch TOS again. I was looking for a good reason to do that anyway
- Status
Similar threads
- Poll
