You ever invite your coworker to watch you give birth just to spite a racist

Meta
Title:	untitled
Creator:	beckettmariner (prev deannatroibolton)deactivated account
Date(s):	sometime before August 24th 2019
Medium:	tumblr discussion
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Next Generation
Topic:	Representation and how it changes over time, sexism, racism, etc
External Links:	on tumblrarchived
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you ever invite your coworker to watch you give birth just to spite a racist is the text commentary provided by tumblr user deannatroibolton under a series of screepcaps from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Deanna Troi is in labor and talking to Data and a doctor. It covers the following dialogue:

Doctor: In my other deliveries the father was always present.
Data: Perhaps I could serve in that capacity?
Doctor: Counselor Troi is going to need the comfort of a human touch and not the cold hand of technology.
Deanna, who looked very displeased by the doctor's previous line of dialogue: Doctor, I think Commander Data will do very nicely.

deannatroibolton captions these screencaps with the comment, "you ever invite your coworker to watch you give birth just to spite a racist" to which another tumblr user, linguisticparadox replied:

Okay howmst the fuck has a ship doctor in the far future never handled a birth without the father present? Are sperm donors and gay couples and trans women no longer a thing in the bajillionth century CE?? :/

Many replies followed, explaining for example that "Hikaru Sulu was Pan-Asian by design" to respond to general anti-Asian sentiments of the time and "attempt to show all Asian people as inherently worthy, inherently human".

Comments

[thatoldantique]

I while understand the frustration with erasure sometimes it helps to look at things through the cultural context of when something was made. Star Trek the Next Generation was made in 1987, this particular episode I believe aired in 1988 a time when a future where the husband was always present for the birth would have been amazing to many of the people watching the show as men had only been allowed to be present for the birth of their children for 10/15ish years at that point in the US.

Women (and many men) fought for decades with hospitals to even have men allowed in the delivery room during the early stages of labor, which can last for several hours, and hospitals only began to give in to their requests in the 1960s but even then they would be kicked out of the room by hospital staff before the actual birth took place. So many of the couples watching the show would have had to go through labor without having/being allowed to support their spouse regardless of their wishes. Having the child’s father present for the birth only began to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Which means most people watching this show either went through birth without the support of their spouse, were not allowed to support their spouse during the birth of their child, or their own mother’s went through that during their birth.

A future where the husbands were always present for the birth was still a little crazy to consider in the late 1980s. A good kind of crazy for the people living in that time, it showed a future where the wishes of the couple were finally consistently listened to by medical professionals as a result of the actions of people during their or their parent’s lifetimes. And it does that by also subverting it in allowing Data to step into the role of the father when the father was unknown and/or unwilling/unable to fill that role (I’ll be honest my knowledge of Next Gen is a bit spotty and I have not seen this whole episode, just a piece of it at family Thanksgiving). The woman’s desires as to how she would give birth are listened to and respected, something that still doesn’t happen in many hospitals now and would have been seen as even more revolutionary then. So while it isn’t perfect I think this scene was actually fairly impressive for its time and cultural context and shows a future that many people of that time would have seen as ideal.

[cannon-fannon]

I think this kind of contextual understanding and analysis is really important because things that look antiquated now were revolutionary then. I remember reading that the mini skirts in Star Trek TOS were legot just in fashion (about 64’ ish), one of the actresses (the one that played Rand) requested they be in the show and both her and Nichelle Nichols said they didn’t see them as demeaning but liberating in that time and context. Where as NOW it looks like ‘sexy male gaze’ but then it wasn’t.

[elfwreck]

Miniskirts are comfortable and easy to move in - unlike longer bulkier skirts, which had previously been required for “modesty.” And unlike the approach of “we’ll just put them in pants,” miniskirts made a statement that women crew-members weren’t being treated like men. Miniskirts were a way to say “I can be an attractive woman, wear comfortable clothes, and still look professional and do a serious job.”

The clothing for that message today would be different.

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