10 More Frustrating Star Trek Moments

The Next Generation episode The Outcast was frustrating for a lot of trekkies, mostly because it tried to tell a story in support of gay pride (for the first time in the franchise's history), but totally missed the mark on a lot of stuff and ended up dealing with gender far more than sexuality.

The Enterprise-D was introduced to the J'naii, a species with only one sex, and Riker started to form a relationship with one of them named Soren, who he found out actually identified as female. The whole episode then focused on her struggle to be accepted as a woman by her society. There are a number of problems with The Outcast, but there's one scene that seems particularly short-sighted.

While speaking with Riker about her sexless species, Riker was extremely confused on what pronouns to use for them. When the episode was made, they/them/theirs were not very popular singular pronouns in America (even though they were popular for describing someone of unknown gender in the past), so Soren told Riker that the J'naii used a gender-neutral pronoun that had no equivalent in English.

Watching this scene back today is particularly frustrating for non-binary folks. Fortunately, Discovery seemed to retcon this by giving us our first non-binary Human character, Adira Tal, who used they/them/theirs, showing that it's not just aliens who can exist outside of male and female expectations.