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?? :/

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.

We all know Geordi and Data might as well have been a couple. In regards to LGBT in TNG in 1992 there was the episode “The Outsider” that ‘accidentally’ said trans rights. Where Commander Riker falls in love and defends a transwoman from a nonbinary alien society. That transwoman gives an amazing speech at the end about being the same as anyone else.

Also also there is an episode of TNG called “The Host” where Dr Crusher falls in love with a trill, a type of alien that switches bodies. Basically at the end ‘he’ gets a new host that is a woman instead of a man and Crusher openly says that she still loves the Trill but she couldn’t be with her because the changing of bodies was too much for her not explicitly that the Trill’s host was now a woman. So there is that very gay scene at the end of the episode where Crusher acknowledges that she at that moment is in love with a woman and that woman acknowledges she is in love with Crusher.

Don’t disrespect TNG for not having explicitly gay characters on network television in the late 80′s early 90′s when the earliest state to legalize gay marriage was not until 2004 and it was a long time for the rest of the US to catch up.