‘The Orville’ Boldly Goes There With Gender-Reassignment Debate Episode (VIDEO)
Exclusive
If Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville isn’t already the new season’s most divisive show—Is it a comedy? Dramedy? Space opera?—the Star Trek homage certainly will be on Thursday’s episode when it moves into its regular night and time slot. Because the hour it’s settling in with touches on several hot-button issues and doesn’t present any easy answers.
In the episode, entitled “About a Girl,” stoic Second Officer Bortus (Peter Macon) and his partner Klyden (Chad Coleman) become parents after the egg Bortus has been incubating hatches…only to find that their child has been born female.
As Moclans, a single-gender species, the pair are required by their home planet’s rule to immediately subject the child to gender-reassignment in order to maintain their race’s all-male purity. This triggers a ship-wide debate and interstellar court case over the child’s rights and gender-versus-sex, while also testing the relationship between Bortus and Klyden, who are split as to how to proceed.
In this exclusive clip from the episode, Chief Medical Officer Claire Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald) reads Bortus for even asking her to operate on the newborn, and gives him a wake-up call regarding the Moclan way of life.
The Orville, Thursday, 9:01/8:01c, Fox.
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R
Looks like she's using human ethics to judge an alien culture.
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C
And what's wrong with that? We have doctors right here on earth who refuse to do what they consider unnecessary cosmetic surgeries. Let them take her to their home planet if that's what it takes.
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R
That's a fair choice, though she is supposed to be amenable to all species under her care.
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C
Amenable when it comes to healing and saving lives maybe, but the child's health and life are not in jeopardy at the present time. If it's life is in jeopardy when they return to their home planet, they'll have to deal with it there.
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R
That's a fair assessment, thank you for the conversation. :)
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C
That was the nicest argument I’ve ever seen on the internet...
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B
To be fair though, the doctors here on earth actually DO perform sex changes on infants if they think the genitals are not the right shape.
It's ironic that the tables are turned in this episode... The alien asking for the thing we normally do and the human calling it abominable...
The intersex community will appreciate this.
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C
I wasn't even talking about gender reassignment which I'm aware they do even to infants. I was thinking of them refusing to perform purely cosmetic procedures like nose jobs or breast augmentations on minors.
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O
...and, on the other hand, are completely fine with circumcisions, a point that thankfully came up in-episode.
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C
You can't really equate the removal of a superfluous piece of skin to a complete gender reassignment. Now, if you want to compare the so-called female circumcisions to it.....
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B
I get that - but the point can be made that here on earth genital surgery on infants actually occurs quite frequently with doctors pressuring parents into getting surgeries done to "normalize" the genitals of infants.
The intersex community has spoke out quite clearly that these surgeries are detrimental to them and they wish that they could be stopped.
I was in favor of the doctor refusing the do the surgery because I believe that no one should be performing non-essential genital surgery on infants.
that's all :)
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G
Dropped the ball on this episode. What is the moral of the story, to shut up and conform. The doctors response to circumcision was classic American propaganda, circumcision does not affect the child's life. Tell that to the hundreds of dead babies and the tens of thousands of boys that undergo reconstructive surgeries to fix botched mutilations. The right answer to the circumcision question which may have also won the case would have been, "genital mutilations is equally unethical and was abandon on earth centuries ago".
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R
Great show tonight! 3 in a row and they are all hits! Seeing that blob with an erection made me spit out my beer!
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O
This was great! "The Orville".
Hoping it wasnt a fluke. -
R
We are throwing Orville parties over here! Great show! Keep up the great work!
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C
Over where? Is there free booze?
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R
There was!
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O
An all-male race doesn't make any sense.
Males are defined by providing sperm, females by having ova. Males don't have ova. Even to have an egg that is hatched outside the body.
If you're a hemaphordite, you don't have 2 sexes, you don't have either sex.-
B
Actually if you are intersex you literally have "both" sexes.
But even that is sort of inaccurate... Sex itself is not truly a binary, we just see it that way because we have been taught that genitals come in 2 shapes and that if they come in any other shape that shape is "wrong".
Plenty of intersex individuals are not only perfectly healthy but can have children.
Women with XY chromosomes men with XX, the children of Papa New Guinea - "female" at birth until they reach the age of 12 and develop a penis and testicles and are suddenly "male" (they too can reproduce by inseminating a woman).
The popular belief that "XY" makes you male isn't even correct... The Y chromosome is only one of 13 or so that encourages penile development.
Your premise also assumes that the species is not able to procreate without "females", which they obviously can. Many species here on earth can produce both sperm and eggs. These are referred to as Hermaphrodites. And unlike the way we use the term to describe intersex children that display unusual genital structures in the animal kingdom a hermaphrodite is any organism with both male and female reproductive organs which produce both "male" gametes (sperm) and "female" gametes (ova). In some animals, the simultaneous hermaphrodites, both male and female organs are functional at the same time but it is not necessary that they both be present as insemination can occur in many different ways.
In this instance the species is clearly hermaphroditic and this infant didn't develop the genitals they expected it to.
They simple are doing what we do when we have an intersex child - they change the genitals so it looks "correct".
It's appalling - both here on earth in the current day and on alien planets.
Thankfully the show is simply hypothetical. Sadly for the intersex children on Earth it is all too real.
And make no mistake - we use the terms "male" and "female" because it is easier than saying "oh, they are a person who produces sperm" and so on. But sex is far from binary. We just do a really good job of surgically removing "abnormal" genitals.
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B
A great example are the Asari. They appear female, but have no "sex" as we define it
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O
There's been debates in fandom for decades on how exactly Tribbles reproduce.
" Born pregnant" doesn't make much sense either.1
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C
Mitosis.
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