I watched the episode recently where I think Dax is on trial for murder? And Sisko is waxing poetic about how he used to pick up chicks with Curzon (and can’t any more?) and then later he’s lamenting that if she were still Curzon he give them a nice punch in the mouth for being so frustrating (but now can’t punch his friend because she’s a woman)
I don’t mean to demean the show or the character Dax, but it was definitely a window into a time where the creators either couldn’t or didn’t want to consider Dax still being attracted to women, but also that it’s totally normal to want to punch your male friends but not your female friend.
It is. Dax was at one point in male when Kor met him then Dax got a new host that was female, and Kor, without hesitation, accepted her.
It may have been a bit oblique (it was the mid-90s), but this is the essence of accepting trans folk: accepting people for who they are, not your preconceptions of what they are.
Two different hosts— still Dax. Same 350+ years of memories and experiences… hardly a different person, just a new incarnation of that person in each host.
DAX was joined with the Jadzia for six years before she died. Surely a rich life, like that of Torias (1 1/2 years), but worthy and memorable nonetheless.
Ok, so, clearly you’ve never seen or heard of Star Trek before (if I’m wrong, I apologize), or you’d know and understand all of this, so I’ll explain:
Trill society has a subset who can be joined with Trill symbiots. These work/slug-like creatures can live for centuries, even longer. They “join” with the humanoid Trill and become a unified “person”, different and unique from either the host or symbiot which came before the Union.
So, once Dax (the symbiot) seperated from Curzon when he died and joined with Jadzia, was that a “new person”? Well… that’s debatable. Jadzia, the new host, was certainly changed, and Dax, the symbiot, certainly had some ”newness” to contend with. But… Jadzia was still Jadzia… plus Dax. It’s like having a new person, deeply nestled inside of your mind and soul. Does that, indeed, constitute a “new person”? Well… it would certainly demarcate many new and notable differences… but also much that remains the same.
It complicated. It’s not black-and-white, and it (probably) depends on individual experiences rather that a general rule.
On that last statement, in my experience a big chunk of the people that have some issue with lgbtq folks seem to have a lot of issues with the fact that a great many things in life are not a simple black/white binary thing.
As soon as an issue or idea is introduced that requires nuance and subtlety they get all “this is unacceptable and unnatural “. Their minds just seem to have a hard time with the answer to something not being simple and universal.
except not no, just yes. it is the same person; what you’re referring to is figurative speech like when people say “I’m not the same person anymore” or whatever.
here’s a conversation that wouldn’t happen:
“you’re still with Jen?”
“no”
“oh, when did you break up”
“we didn’t. but she’s older now”
Have you ever had the experience of meeting an old friend after not seeing them for many years? If yes, did they seem the same to you or different?
I have had this experience several times and several times they were a different person than I remembered. We got along easily when we were young but now we have almost nothing in common. I’m sure my own changes as a person had as much to do with it as theirs.
Married couples sometimes get divorced after many years for this reason. “I was so in love with him when we were young but now he’s changed.”
I ask because the show makes it extremely clear on multiple occasions that while Curzon and Jadzia Dax share memories and a lot of personality traits, they are ultimately distinct people. This distinction becomes even more clear when Ezri Dax is introduced.
This is explicitly mentioned in the episode you are referencing. Jadzia Dax is not bound by the Klingon blood oath Curzon took. While Kor sees her and Curzon as identical, the other two Klingons don’t and are reluctant to let her come. One also makes frequent comments that Jadzia is incapable on account of her being a woman.
As a sidenote, Klingon society is extremely regressive. Part of this is the presence of strong gender roles. I highly doubt they’d be accepting of trans individuals.
Discovery has a non-binary Trill/Symbiote pair. They are non binary because the host identifies as such. They also consider themselves a different person than previous pairs, some of whom are non binary and some of who are cisgendered.
I get where you’re coming from, but, anti-trans hate has been around for centuries. Probably longer.
Now, during the 90s, gay/lesbian advocacy was the big deal. And, honestly, the heteros got upsetteros over just that. So, trans issues were… well… unfairly delayed as an issue we all thought (at the time) should come after the mainstream could handle the simple idea of boys kissing in public without being immediately hate-crimed.
I’m on board with thinking that this was the wrong approach. There’s a little bit about this, but, I think we should’ve gone in a lot more fervently and headstrong, rather than pussyfooting around on, begging the bigots to like us, as we did at the time.
Nonetheless, here we are now.
And defining my age?
And I feel, when the dogs begin to smell her… will she smell alone?
There is research out there somewhere that confirms the commenter’s memory. I can’t find it on a whim unfortunately, I’ll post if I can find it. From what I recall from the research (I’m sure I’m butchering it): In the 80s and 90s trans people were a lot more accepted. At some point when certain monied bigots saw the writing on the wall that they were losing the fight of gay and lesbian hate they started a campaign to vilify trans people.
Yes there were always assholes and prejudice, but it’s only in the past 20 years that trans hate became a calling card of demagogues. It really was more accepted in the 90s.
In no way do I want to minimize the awful way trans people are treated, regardless of age. I’m just trying to remember some research I read once.
A lot of people forget what the 90’s was like. You could call someone a f** and people just laughed. It was part of the high school insult compendium.
Anti-gay was strong. People laughed openly at Matthew Shepard getting killed. “Shouldn’t have came onto them! I would beat up a (gay) should they ever come onto me!” I remember kids getting violently beaten in the gym locker room for being meat gazers, and the school just told the victim how this needs to stay quiet or else everyone will know your little son is gay. I went to a fairly large high school in a slightly blue city, and this was just how it was. There was no acceptance of trans because no one dared come out as trans, they saw how gay people were treated.
I am glad the zeitgeist has shifted and people can be themselves. As one of those old millennials, I honestly don’t understand trans, but I want them to be who they are and be happy. Cannot imagine being in a body where your gender feels wrong, it sounds like a daily pain. If you are reading this and are trans, there are cis people who accept you for who you are and would listen to everything you need to say.
”If you are reading this and are trans, there are cis people who accept you for who you are and would listen to everything you need to say."
Well said.
And you’ve highlighted the real reason Trek (and the Trek community) is sacred to many of us. It (and you) help us learn how to say things like this that we’re not finding the words for.
I’m sure your memory is correct, but I think it’s missing a major part of the issue. Trans issues weren’t discussed, so you weren’t shown the bigotry that was hidden away. It’s like for black people, the majority didn’t show their bigotry until they were asking for equality. When they were “in their place” you just go about your life like normal and it’s not a point of discussion.
That said, a lot of the anti-trans movement is created artificially to use as a target to distract voters. It’s a fake issue they can purposefully misrepresent so their voters ignore the actual harm they’re doing to them.
Trans issues weren’t forefront, but they weren’t completely accepted either. It wasn’t a wedge issue, but most people didn’t see trans people in their day to day life(I know invisible isn’t non existent), so it was a far off issue. They felt free to make jokes about them and never got push back.
Now we have a greater cultural movement for blanket tolerance AND an “engagement” based onmaking people angry.
Also, the idea that we live in a Monoculture is junk. You might have lived in a retentively tolerant part of the world, but doesn’t mean the next city or even neighbor over is the same. The internet is also responsible for ripping away the idea of nonoculture.
Probably. I also believe that they would truly honor someone who went through a difficult, painful journey in order to realize - and become - who they really are.
What’s SNW and even DSC then? I’m confused how main characters like Ortegas and Stamets are “set-pieces”? I do really hope they bring back Captain Angel though, what a great baddie (you love) haha.
Well, when they only exist to die for plot points and their only character developent exists to service the convenience of the moment— yeah, clearly these characters are only important as a matter of plot convenience, not as actual people.
It’s cheap, shitty, and shallow. And if you don’t see that for what it is, I feel very bad for you. but I feel worse for all of the LGBTQ audience members who are fooled into thinking that this is progress. It’s fucking trash.
Trek has only evolved from “lgbtq people are invisible” to “lgbtq people are expendable for the sake of ratings”
They only acknowledge us to murder us horribly in order to yank tears.
…Seven of Nine and Rafi got their own command. Stamets and Culber remained a loving couple throughout (apart from Culver’s unfortunate temporary death) and adopted a young enby who had their own growth throughout the series while everyone respected their pronouns. Nurse Chapel is a bi woman who withdrew her application to a fellowship at the Vulcan Science Council, essentially telling them “your fellowship ain’t ready for me”.
I wouldn’t consider their queer identities to be conveniences or their character arcs to be simple plot points by any stretch of the imagination. retconning Sulu as gay? Maybe. Agender computer genius aliens stealing the ship or a third-gender alien’s romantic encounter with Riker? Okay, sure.
But the latest Trek serieses put queer people in space and haven’t been using them as lip service or exclusively as minor supporting characters. They’ve been full-fledged characters whose queer identities the audience was been made aware of and shown that, in the future, the bigots lose because their queerness doesn’t define them…it is just a part of who they are. They are masters of their own destinies.
(That being said, as much as I hate the lip service stuff, I do wish they’d have thrown us a bone with Detmer and Owosekun because c’mon…enough queerbaiting already.)
They’ve had out, badass prominent characters whose identities don’t define them in the last three live action Star Trek series, spitting in the face of the aNTi-wOkE haters who claim to love Star Trek but have only ever watched it through their own particular bigoted myopic lenses. What do you want them to do? Invent an actual time machine to do rewrites of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT?
The best way to apologize is to learn from your mistakes and do better in the future. The Star Trek show runners have taken this to heart, so I don’t know what more you want from them. (And I say this as a long-time, trans, leftist Star Trek fan.)
If anyone had a problem it might be the Ferengi watching (Fe)Males putting on clothes and doing business, but they’d just figure out a fine to levy and keep the latinum moving.
I don’t know, but there’s a pattern of Rick Berman having something to do with sexist takes in Star Trek. It’s complicated, and there’s a lot of hear-say. And I think there ought to be some credit given all around for Trek generally being progressive for it’s time.
But it seems like more of the issues seemed to happen when Rick Berman was involved, at least in the TNG, DS9 era:
Rick Berman certainly worked to pull down the franchise. To be clear, though, Ferengi society was not a sexist take. It was a negative depiction of a sexist society. You were never supposed to watch an episode and come away thinking “man, those Ferengi really have it all figured out.”
You were never supposed to watch an episode and come away thinking “man, those Ferengi really have it all figured out.”
Yeah. Certainly.
It still stands out as a weird artistic choice, I think. We see this extreme take on sexism, but it’s a long time before we get a female Ferengi protagonist shown overcoming it.
Yeah, that’s definitely fair to say. I don’t think we saw any Ferengi women until DS9. TNG tried to introduce them as the new big bad in season 1, but when that kind of fizzled they really didn’t seem to have any solid ideas to develop them.
It’s worth pointing out that Grand Negus Rom led sweeping changes in Ferengi society largely inspired by the business acumen of his beloved Moogie and to a lesser extent his wife, Leta.
Ferengi were originally written to be a villain race when Roddenberry was directly running TNG, but they ended up testing comical to audiences, originally they were very 60’s free love era coded villains, wearing fur, using space whips, and of course absurdly misogynistic, They also sinffed around like animals, and hooted and hollarded very barbarically, and they weren’t into Rikeresk Polyamory AT ALL, the no clothes thing was a really early line of dialog where a ferengi says “disgusting, they cloth their women, inviting you to disrobe them” or some stupid shit like that. DS9 retconed the Ferengi A LOT, showing the first ferengi female, which was just a slightly shorter ferengi with smaller ears. I always kinda hoped they’d explain woman never leaving Ferengiar, or their homes by having them be very dysmorphic to the males, like huge and immobile physiologically, because aliens. but they mostly made ferengi a comic relief race, they’re kookie! but eventually Moogie controls ferenginar through two puppet Grand Negus. At first the culture shock causes a lot of backlash, but once clothing companies realize they can expend their markets by some 50% of local on planet business everyone stop caring.
Depends on where they’re hypocritical or not. In real life, queer culture is entirely about making less restrictive laws regarding morality. The “small government” types should absolutely be locking arms at Pride Parades, but the Pride Gadsden is a rarity.
You think an empire that is extremely sexist to the point where they let a Ferengi be a leader of a noble house before a woman would be super accepting of trans issues?
…Yes? Because I stated exactly why I feel it fits with the Klingon ethos? Outside of combat, Klingons don’t generally favor deception, so why would a trans woman trying to pretend she’s a man not be looked at as dishonorable? Besides, Grilka couldn’t be the leader of the House because (as far as the Klingons knew) Kozak died in combat which meant Quark had the right to be the head of the House. Had Quark admitted upfront that Kozak had gotten drunk and fallen on his own blade, he never would have been involved and Grilka would have been granted the House.
In the real world, it is entirely possible to be against gender but not sex (c.f. TERFs like J.K. Rowling) or to be against sex but not gender (c.f. how many gender reassignment surgeries are performed in Iran, where it’s culturally better to be a woman or trans-woman than it is to be a gay man).
A huge part of the Klingon civil war arc is that the Duras family had no male heir. They eventually just dig one out of the brothels. At no point is it considered a viable option for either of the sisters to openly lead.
When Worf wanted to get married to Jadzia, they needed Martok’s wife’s approval due to the extremely stratified gender roles. When they had trouble getting said approval, Martok basically said that it wasn’t his place to interfere and sort it out himself. A huge portion of the reason why Jadzia had trouble getting approval is because she doesn’t behave like you’d expect a Klingon women to. All of this friction is in spite of the fact that Martok is a lot more open minded than most other Klingons.
Klingon society is regressive in a million other ways. They are governed by a glorified aristocracy. Worf installed Martok as chancellor by killing Gowron in a casual death battle. They advised crusher to help Worf kill himselves when he was paralyzed. The society is still fairly religious. A popular coming of age ceremony involves repeatedly getting shocked with pain sticks.
All of that’s just off the top of my head. There’s probably more. The idea that Klingon society is ass backwards in a million different ways but super tolerant of trans individuals stretches all belief and feels more akin to Tumblr headcanon than any actual reality.
My dude, your lame Tumblr insult aside, you’re still conflating discrimination of sex with discrimination of gender. Yes Klingon society is sexist in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t necessitate that they’re genderist too, because 1) despite what conservative ideology believes sex and gender aren’t the same thing, and 2) you’re attempting to square that circle using human logic with a species that isn’t. I gave you an example of each situation that exists on our current planet as is.
You’re also ignoring that L’Rell was Chancellor of the Empire and also that lots of female Klingons are shown in the military same as the males.
There is absolutely nothing in Klingon society that indicates that they’d be accepting of trans individuals. There are a million things in Klingon society that, while not explicitly anti trans, heavily hint at a society that would not be accepting.
I feel like you like Star Trek and want every aspect of it to be explicitly pro trans. However instead of just acknowledging that Klingons were portrayed as extremely regressive anyway, you invent a headcanon and grasp as straws to justify it.
She may have overacted. Once Gowron became aware of the situation, he addressed her directly and assured her we would honor her rights to the house. She may have not needed The Bravest Ferengi to get involved, but it didn’t help her being understood.
I am neither trans, nor would I ever presume to speak on behalf of trans people. The reason I posted this is because, over the years, this specific meme has been presented repeatedly as evidence that Klingons are excepting of trans folx.
As such, I think it’s safe to assume that, yes, it carries meaning of (at least some) importance.
In that, I hope my own presentation here is thusly interpreted as an expression of goodwill.
I guess I was more hoping to hear people’s stories about seeing that and what it meant to them when they first saw it. I like hearing how Star Trek inspires people and makes them feel more accepted.
Except for the stan I seem to have picked up. Downvotes everything of mine. Given the posts/comments they dont hit, I suspect they’re on either sh.it just.works or hexbear based on a pattern analysis of which instances I post in and which instances are defederated from them.
I read a book about the realization that 50% of other people won’t like you, won’t like what you say, your style or whatever. That’s true to life and always good to have in your mind, so you don’t let everything get on a personal level to you.
But there’s always that one special idiot that may also stan you.
Both of my teenage children and I happen to be non-binary. The scene in Discovery where Adira is semi-asleep at a console and Culber comes in using the wrong pronouns to refer to Adira, and Stamets corrects him and tells him Adira uses they/them pronouns, and Culber shifts seamlessly into it and the two of them have an entire conversation about them…that scene legit had me squeeing. I’d never seen such an exchange happen in any show, and it was perfection. It was meant to show well-meaning allies who struggle with gender-neutral pronouns how simple they are to use and how meaningful and important it is to honor them because the people who use them are important.
When I first saw this, I was in a different point in my life and didn’t know who I was (I only knew I was angry and miserable), and I loved that Kor immediately accepted her. It made sense to me. I don’t know if it was subconscious or not, I’ll probably never know.
But I know I really love this scene now, and I’m grateful to the show writers and producers for including it, especially after learning about the uphill battle they faced to integrate themes like this. Inclusion matters and makes a difference, even if stupid assholes complain. It’s a lovely scene, and I’m forever grateful.
It was really disappointing to learn what a colossal dick Berman is, but it did explain why he was almost completely absent in that DS9 documentary and why no one bothered to mention him. Yeah, terrible choice for a Trek (or any progressive program) showrunner.
asexual people can still have sex and enjoy it, to my understanding it’s they lack sexual desire or a need for sex. It’s also on a spectrum, like most things
Kira, Laas, and the Female Changeling would assert otherwise…
And considering that he linked with just about any Changeling he met (including, literally, all of them at once), I believe the best assessment of Odo is that he’s pansexual.
How in the fuck is trying to let you know that you missed a joke about fluid trolling? Please look at the context of the thread you’re replying to instead of making knee jerk assumptions and just firing off “hot take” replies.
I’m not the one looking foolish here.
I understand that you said in some other comment that you have someone on lemmy stalking you and downvoting your shit. I understand that whoever the fuck the user plainsimplegarak is, the guy who called you Jimmy, is weird and unhinged. I am neither of those people.
I was just trying to tell you that you missed a dumb joke about the word fluid, and responded agressively to the person making it. My bad that I should have replied to you one comment higher rather than below “garak”, but it looked like you were just doubling down on weird out of place aggression.
Either way, I have no idea what in the fresh hell you think is going on now or who the fuck you think I am. Please take a moment and come back to this comment thread when you aren’t… in whatever weird ass state you seem to be in right now.
I’ve only ever interacted with you here, trying to point out the stupid joke you seemed to miss and misinterpret as some bigoted attack, and now I’m confused as all hell.
Ok, you’re clearly having an eye-popping, rage-reaction and aren’t rational. As such, I’m - quite rationally - ignoring every ridiculous thing you’ve said and hoping that a mental health professional can stabilize you.
May the fire in your mind light the path to your recovery.
Hey. I hope you can read through this chain later. This guy didn’t say anything mean and you snapped at him. I get it. We all do things quickly and poorly when angry. It’s all good. Your response was poor and I think you should consider that in the future to try to avoid making the same mistake.
The post shows you care to some extent about how other people feel. I would hope that extends to people on the other side of a conversation to you too. I can understand you were upset by other things, but that doesn’t make it OK to try to upset other people. It won’t help you.
Oof that projection though. Not everyone has that problem, immediately going there (and the rest of your below tirade) suggests you do. Nothing more insufferable than a zealot just waiting to be mad.
I named my cat Dax after Jadzia. He’s a boy and we kept his first name from the adoption centre, so now he’s Nelson Dax - I thought about this very scene when we chose the name. Such a heartwarming exchange
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