Clicked on one of those astroturfed youtube vids of a battle involving the Kaylon or whatever and I kept getting bombarded with 'The Orville' Youtube shorts in the days since. One of them was about that Abortus guy and his husband fighting over their kid's gender.
I never got passed episode three or four of the first season, so I had no idea. These are such thinly veiled Hollywoke talking points and specific political pet peeves. You must be absolutely blind to not see what was going on. Charlize 'My Sons Are Girls Now' Theron was also on the show.
And this microwaved slop was supposed to be the acceptable normie alternative to Star Trek Disco/STD?
It's been a long time since I've watched The Orville and I don't think I ever saw the third season. My memory of the Bortus/Klyden thing is that their government basically mandated male-male relationships (reproduction was never explained that I recall).
One of them, Klyden, was born a biological female, but as a child was forced to undergo sex mutilation to appear male.
You can read it as a pro-trans "identity" plotline, but the more blunt and direct interpretation is a detrans, forced child sex changes are bad plot.
RIP Norm Macdonald.
That whole arc starts with the Bortus laying a massive egg and since it was his husband who had been changed at birth it seems females of the species might not even be needed in the whole thing.
Could be like various animals on Earth where without the other sex the offspring are only ever 1 sex with a few outlier cases due to reasons. There are wasp species which are haplodiploid and any unfertilised offspring born are male IIRC because from an energy budget POV it's cheaper to only put in the effort and energy to create males that can mate with multiple females than it will be to do the alternative. Sure females are produced but it will depend on resource availability whether any laying females then commit to spending the additional costs for what will potentially benefit other egg laying females more.
Aphids can also produce clones of themselves via asexual reproduction/parthanogenesis when looking to simply boost pop numbers under conditions of bountiful resources. When there are fewer resources then they lay eggs which can produce males for sexual reproduction.
The Orville and other shows taking these concepts and applying them in some way to aliens wouldn't be too surprising although it's likely the writers lack of intimate knowledge with biology in these fields leads to both inaccuracies and loose threads left unanswered because at times it doesn't always need fully addressed.
clow fish is the best example of this. ALL clown fish are born male. When they cohabitate, the dominant alpha male grow ovaries and lays eggs that the other males fertilize. When the alpha male egg layer dies, the next most dominant steps into the role and grows ovaries.
But Bortus's "husband" was/is a women.
For all we know, they have always required male & female to mate. But their culture buried the public existence of women and forcibly put women through genital mutilation so everyone is convinced the species uses asexual reproduction.
to be honest, that particular episode came off as a 'no easy answers' type of story... yeah, the characters had strong opinions, in both directions, and what happened in the end was what it was, however the episode didn't exactly spoonfeed an easy answer to the problem.
It's part of why the showed appealed to classic star trek fans. it had its problems, but it didn't act as though every moral question had an easy answer by the conclusion of a story arc. I kinda tuned out somewhere in season 2 (wasn't the show, just other things going on), so I don't know what happened after that...
I think the are a single sex species with the rare female birth. So when a female birth happens they turn it male