So I've been barely active on Lemmy for a litany of reasons but I am active elsewhere. Specifically, Bluesky. I run an account that I've posted here a couple times called the Starfleet Press Office where I post lil tweets that take place kinda within the Star Trek universe, breaking the fourth wall to an extent. The idea is that the Department of Temporal Investigations owed a favor to the team in charge of the S.P.O so he got a temporal link to Bsky set up. For fun. So random tweets get posted that are commenting on current episodes (A few were made for different Lower Decks episodes as they were posted), other ones about just random events in the universe that I think would be funny (sometimes lining up with holidays, like some Santa teleportation nonsense), and others that take real world events and parody them in the Star Trek universe, like the ferengi CEO of a health insurance conglomerate getting killed.
I'm clearly doing something right because @RealGulDukat, the guy who posts Trump tweets as if Dukat said them, follows only 13 people on Bsky and one of them is me. So whatever nonsense I keep posting I'm just gonna stick with. Drop by and say hi!
But the bit that matters is that characters we're meant to admire chose to accept Dax as they presented at any given time, without giving them needless crap for it.
I recall most LGBT characters on TV at the time had to accept a studio mandated minimum quota of jokes at their expense.
Dax was refreshingly different, in being allowed to present as LGBT and as a heartthrob love interest.
(And bonus kudos to Garak the Simple Taylor for also being an LGBT heart-throb love interest when that certainly wasn't allowed by the studios.)
I mean, yeah. You're very correct that Dax is about male gaze much more than Trans representation.
But this sign I had made special for Star Trek applies once again:
Lol.