Monday’s broadcast of NBC’s rebooted Quantum Leap went woke pushing transgender athletes on kids’ sports, promotting boys claiming to be girls using girls’ locker rooms, and celebrating the idea of players born as males competing against natural-born female opponents.
The episode entitled “Let Them Play” featured Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee) leaping into the body of a high school girls basketball coach in the year 2012. The coach is also the father of one of his players, Gia (Josielyn Aguilera), a biological male claiming to be a transgender girl.
The show is a reboot of the 1990s cult classic series of the same name starring Scott Bakula in which a scientist uses a machine to travel in time but instead ends up leaping into the minds and bodies of one person after another to “set time right” by altering decisions that would lead to disaster. The show was very liberal for its day and confronted many social issues.
Monday’s episode pushed hard for “inclusion” of trans athletes giving no serious consideration to those who oppose transgender athletes, especially in high schools. It opened with Ben putting Gia into a game without knowing that Gia was either his “daughter” or a transgender person. Ben’s spur of the moment decision to put Gia in the game set off a series of controversies as the school was confronted with protests against Gia’s playing against biological girls.
The rest of the episode presents Gia’s family as they struggle to deal with the blowback of Gia’s game day and the Quantum Leap project’s computer warnings that Gia will run away and end up committing suicide over the anguish of being ostracized by teammates unless Ben can fix it all.
Throughout the episode, Gia is presented as the only real adult in the room as the character lectures everyone over “inclusion” and the morality of right and wrong. Gia even wins over the one girl who feels she is losing her spot on the team to Gia.
The episode also features several gay, drag queen, and trans characters in a series already notable for featuring Mason Alexander Park as a trans character and a main cast member.
There is only one voice of opposition to Gia’s playing and that comes from the mother of one of the girls on the team. While the mother says she supports Title IX rules that mandate inclusion in school sports, she opposes allowing biological boys playing against biological girls.
“We had to fight for Title IX,” the mother tells Gia’s parents. “So I’m not gonna sit here as you take away women’s sports because you think there’s no difference between boys and girls.”
But the mother is portrayed as a mean-spirited, Karen-like character whose point of view is presented as bigoted.
Naturally, the episode ends with Gia being warmly welcomed into the girls locker room and being treated as a full member of the team. Oddly, the year this episode is set, 2012, was years before the transgender athlete issue really heated up. It is also noteable that the series picked model and actress Josielyn Aguilera, a natural-born woman, to play a “transgender woman.”
The episode was written by trans activist Shakina Nayfack (who also appeared as trans character Dottie in the show) who told the website Gayety that she felt sure her story pitch would be accepted by the series.
“I pitched this episode at my interview. I knew pretty much going into it that because Quantum Leap has Mason Alexander Park, we have a trans actor as a series regular,” Nayfack said. “The show was committed to addressing trans issues in the first season, which is huge. A lot of times, special interest issues have to be kicked back to later seasons. But there was a commitment there and a willingness to take a big step to stand up for trans kids, not only from the writer’s room and the producers of Quantum Leap, but from NBC and Universal. So we did it.”
The entire episode was a one-sided exercise in advocacy for transgenderism in school sports that never gave serious consideration to legitimate concerns that males are physically too powerful to be allowed to play against biological women.
Indeed, the episode wholly ignored the fact that most Americans do not support allowing transgender “women” to play against biological women.
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