I've seen "Star Trek: ٍEnterprise" and I realized that it can have some positive effects on the audience, including reduce hatred of homosexuals or transsexuals. In the Star Trek you see many intelligent species from other worlds that playing an important role in the story. These species are lovely just like humans, they're moral just like humans, they have their own abilities and inabilities, ... . But there are some strange(strange for humans) differences between them and humans, too. For example there is a species called "Kreetassans", they don't eat food in the public because they believe that eating food is like mate and must done in private. So when some humans accidently eat food in the presence of them they've become angry and considered that offensive. When humans became aware of this, they makes an apology, which the Kreetassans accepts. There is another species that have third sex called "cogenitor". In general there are countless such examples: - Species(Including humans) have some strange(strange for each other) behaviors, norms, ... - Each species(specially humans) have peaceful and tolerant behavior toward this differences. They accept differences. I don't know if creators of Star Trek deliberately done this. But i think Star Trek actually make the audience love other species in the series and accept their differences and of course it'll help them to learn to accept(instead of hatred) differences in the real world generally. So i think Star Trek inherently is against homophobia and transphobia. Do you agree with me?
Star Trek writers have always been very left-oriented in their perspectives, especially as it relates to social issues. I've got to head up to class here otherwise I could probably give a plethora of information about this. One of the best examples though is that Star Trek: The Original Series did the first ever interracial kiss (Kirk and Uhura) on television - in the 60s, when many of the audience in America viewed such a thing as downright obscene. Anyhow, yes, Star Trek is an extremely socially progressive franchise.
This reminds me of when they were going to have a canon SS couple in DS9 but it never came to be, unfortunately. I love star trek and how they bring about these social issues that other shows barely touch on.
I can't speak to the other series, but it was definitely intentional with TOS. Coexisting and respecting others' differences was a clear theme throughout the series, as were the consequences of racism. I'm a firm believer that if Roddenberry could have gotten away with it in the '60s, Kirk and Spock very well could have been the first gay pairing. They were, after all, the origin of slash fiction.
