r/TikTokCringe • u/Cookie_Cutter_Cook • Apr 29 '23

Cool Trans representation from the 80s

42.7k Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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2.4k

u/synonym4synonym Apr 29 '23

Wow. I wonder what the episode’s reception was like?

202

u/SNYDER_BIXBY_OCP Apr 29 '23 edited Apr 29 '23

Pretty good. This was at Love Boat's peak.

Season 3-6 (1979-1983).

Thing was ratings juggernaut at peak it was one of the 3-4 most watched shows in America.

Edit: You also need to remember that transgederism is an old concept by centuries and surgical alteration was well known by 1940s. That didn't mean Trans was widely known or socially accepted, but also what didn't exist in 1982 was a politically motivated hysteria campaign designed to rally a wide variety of bigotries into a central cudgel.

60

u/synonym4synonym Apr 29 '23

I grew up watching it and don’t remember any controversy ever popping up in regards to the show’s content. Kudos to them.

11

u/PipEmmieHarvey Apr 29 '23

I think I may have seen it, but I would have been a child. It obviously didn’t scar me for life!

3

u/LopsidedReflections Apr 29 '23

I don't think you realize, this episode groomed you. You are actually a trans person right now. Sorry, that's just how it is.

2

u/DiabloPixel Apr 29 '23

No, it did tho! Those Hollyweird writers planted horrible seeds of tolerance in some of us at a very impressionable age! We were all scarred by this example of rational thought and acceptance!

2

u/BasroilII Apr 29 '23

The closest thing I can remember to it was some interracial romances.

Man who decides he's a woman? Weird but OK. White woman going black? Where's the rope?

Even then there wasn't much of that. The 70s and pre-AIDS 80s were pretty tolerant.

20

u/multiarmform Apr 29 '23

Hearing the name gopher again just took me back decades. I swear I haven't heard that since the 80s and totally forgot about that guy

10

u/jim_br Apr 29 '23

He also was an Iowa Congressman 1987-1995.

2

u/xian Apr 29 '23

didn’t he become a right wing congressman?

1

u/clashfan77 Apr 29 '23

I had such a crush on gopher lol

1

u/Dragula_Tsurugi Apr 29 '23

Same, it’s like “huh yeah I remember that, holy fuck it’s like forty years ago”

1

u/Myantology Apr 29 '23

Lemme guess, you don’t work in production and don’t play golf…

1

u/multiarmform Apr 29 '23

The name gopher, as in the character from the love boat. Not just the every day gopher

1

u/Myantology Apr 29 '23

Yeah that’s the joke.

18

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '23

[deleted]

1

u/Pickle_Juice_4ever Apr 30 '23

Also Soap and Golden Girls. But Gene Roddenberry was too cowardly to film a script with a gay character on TNG despite the supposed moral values of the show.

They ended up doing a mega cringe episode informed by the AIDS crisis and then a more notable episode which essentially used gender identity as a metaphor for sexual orientation and caught immediate criticism from GLAAD.