Previously on Femslash Friday: The Young Avengers.
Star Trek's greatest appeal, if you talk to the nerds who are really into it, is its bold embrace of a post-scarcity structure. In Star Trek, technology has allowed humanity to earnestly and fully eliminate sexism, racism, poverty, even extreme weather disasters or pollution. Every single structural problem on Earth is truly gone forever, they're all really gone, and now humanity is doing the only thing really still worth doing, exploring space.
The Original Series was full of boundaries being broken—a black woman the equal of a white man, Russians working together with Americans. It also featured a stunningly close friendship between one James T. Kirk and Spock. This is Femslash Friday, so we will not go into their fascinating relationship, but needless to say, the fan reaction to it was huge. The very term "slash fiction" comes from Star Trek fans, who would identify their erotic zines like GRUP with terms like "Kirk/Spock" (Kirk slash Spock, get it??)
When The Next Generation booted up, dropping the "man" from "where no one has gone before!" intro speech, the hopes were high that like its predecessor, it'd push the bounds of what was regularly seen on TV. In terms of gender, it mostly punted. There's one episode where Will Riker dates a member of a species without gender, but the alien quickly comes out as identifying as female, a crime punishable by brutal retaliation on her planet (Jonathan Frakes, aka Will Freaking Riker, later came out saying he felt the alien should have identified as male). Dr. Beverly Crusher falls in love with a Trill, a parasitic species that takes different hosts for dozens of lifetimes, but decides she can't continue the relationship when the Trill switches from a male to a female host.
Read more Femslash Friday: Deep Space Nine at The Toast.