The Good Place vs. "The Good Place"

What follows is a bunch of things I've kinda put together following the end of The Good Place season finale. If you've not watched The Good Place to the end, you've done yourself a terrible disservice and should fix that. Anyway, spoilers.

On "Transvestite"

I recently came across someone mentioning online that the word 'transvestite' has fallen out of favor. At first, I was a little confused. I can understand it being largely inappropriate- after all, it can be easily incorrectly used to identify a transgender person, implying they are merely dressing as the opposite gender but aren't truly that gender. But it seemed to me it still had value as a word- after all, Eddie Izzard. A man, firmly identifying as a man, wearing women's clothes and makeup.

Kitty image irrelevant to post.

But it occurs to me that if Eddie is a man, wearing his own clothes, aren't they men's clothes? They belong to a man. They're not worn by anyone other than a man. How are they possibly women's clothes? And if they're not women's clothes, he's just a man with a particular style, like pretty much every other man.

Of course, I'm not actually saying Eddie isn't allowed to have his own identification as an executive transvestite. It's just not something I'd ever really sat down and thought too much about before. It just became bizarre to me that things can belong to a gender. If you don't sew up the middle of those lower body garments, that's a woman's skirt. What if a man owns it and wears it? Nope, it still belongs to some mysterious theoretical woman who might come claim it someday. You've been warned, damn you! So maybe there's no real value to the word 'transvestite' after all- it describes a person who, ideally, doesn't need to be described at all.

Even More Star Trek

So, in TNG, Data is male. People constantly refer to him in the masculine and even as "Mr. Data." In fact, we even know he is "fully functional" thanks to Tasha Yar. This is, of course, despite him having no genetic masculinity at all: he is a robot. He has no Y chromosome- or any alien equivalent thereof. However, we can just accept that Data, despite having no genetic masculinity or capability of sexual reproduction, is male. The earliest and most fundamental episode dealing with his personhood, after all, is called "Measure of a Man". Why is it so fundamentally hard to accept this with people? No idea.

Random questions to ponder: would TNG have been any different if Data had remained agender and asexual? His maleness feels utterly default. It rarely comes into play, so I posit that if he had had no gender at all, the show would've been the same.

On the other hand, if he had been female, how different would the show have been? I feel like the female characters were done a rather large disservice on TNG as compared to other Star Trek shows (especially DS9) and that might've been helpful. But would a female Data be as heavily sexualized as, say, Seven of Nine, who had a very similar thematic journey to Data, but had to do it in a shiny catsuit with various crewmembers ogling her? Probably.

Just musings.