He doesn't pick a gender for his child, instead letting them pick their own identity. Pretty wild gender theory for early 90s daytime television.
He doesn't pick a gender for his child, instead letting them pick their own identity. Pretty wild gender theory for early 90s daytime television.
There was a really good episode where Riker falls in love with a person from a genderless society.
Another cool thing about that episode is that Jonathan Frakes wanted the character who he fell in love with to be played by a man.
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That episode gives me such mixed feelings. It seems to be at the same time about sexuality and about gender identity, and conflates the two a bunch. Considering the cultural context it was probably intended to be primarily about sexuality, and ended up being about gender by accident because of that conflation. Or maybe more accurately, it tried to use gender as a metaphor for sexuality, but constantly muddles the metaphor by being outright about sexuality again.
It seems to a priori reject the idea of sexual and/or romantic attraction without one party being male and the other being female, which is... unfortunate for an episode about different conceptions of sexuality. Again, I think this is because the episode gets confused about its own metaphor.
On the plus side, it very much presents conversion therapy as an absolutely awful thing, which is great for the era, and it was clearly made with good intentions. It would have been much stronger if Soren was played by a male actor as Frakes wanted.
It's also just a great Riker episode. In general, I love how TNG has this big cast of characters who are all fundamentally good people, and still manages to create interesting conflicts between them, by presenting them with genuine moral dilemmas and have their philosophies play out. Why can't modern shows seem to do this?