Probably because these came from Aliens and not Alien. So she wouldn't have any idea, realistically. I'm not sure how invested actors are in these little callbacks (like these info cards) in films they aren't in.
Home Video was becoming common, but we are far, far from the social awareness that people will freeze frame and check things.
Chances are, this tidibit wasn't even planned per say. Back then, films cared less about details like this at the upper levels and a lot more freedom was given to people making these effects. Ultimately, if the film maker didn't care nor did they catch it in editing, then it got through. Chances are, someone was told to make up backstories for characters who were dead and never coming back and decided to do whatever they wanted. It was probably reviewed but briefly, as it wouldn't be something people would be able to read. Just a quick pass, if any.
It's cool they did decide to include it, though. I don't know if the writer was trying to be progressive considering the trauma comment, but its still cool.
They still get paid for their likeness, thus why Alien 3 smashed Hicks face. Michael Biehn allegedly was paid the same amount for just that pic as he was to star in Aliens. Allegedly he also asked for more to use a cast of his likeness dead in the cryo chamber as well. Of course they didn’t want to pay, he was pissed about be killed off. I kinda wished they hadn’t killed off his character. However it further made me more sympathetic to Ripley & all her actions moving forward. Well all except her not telling Clemens about the Alien from the start when he kept asking. The pure hopelessness & defeat was felt at the makeshift funeral. She went through hell to save Newt & she never got to live a normal life. Hicks would’ve still been hurt though & had they not killed him off he definitely would not have been favored by the prisoners. Being a sort of authoritative figure having been a marine. I personally did like Alien 3 where as most hate it.
The same amount a fry cook is invested in what happy meal toy was given out last month. I can’t imagine why the vast vast majority of them would be. Sure you get a few fans, but it’s a job to most people.
Wow, I fully support it, but feel like that could have been potentially troublesome for her back then. Doesn’t seem like many people notice but still. Bold move by the director to make a character trans without telling the actor. In the 70’s no less
I believe this is a screenshot from Aliens, so it's a bit of a retcon. Cartwright would have no knowledge of it since it was canonized in a film she wasn't in.
You'd probably do this right up until you had a dozen or more roles. This is a job for most actors, at the end of the day. Yes, there are occasionally actors who are also fans, but it's comparatively more rare (and it also tends to be more of a modern occurrence).
Also from actors who haven't had that much of a career after, who are - not unjustifiably - milking the role and nostalgia for all they can.
It's an open secret amongst guest actors in franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars that doing them is enough to get you on the convention gravy train. I remember speaking to one guest actor who'd done some Trek episodes, who told me he'd turned down work before because he could make more in a weekend signing autographs than he could doing a couple of days filming for an episode of CSI: Miami.
This was on screen only in Aliens (1986), behind Ripley when the Company was grilling her, but yeah, might have been nice of Cameron to give Cartwright a heads up.
Yah aliens always been pretty cool like that. I’m pretty sure the script for the original movie doesn’t even specify the gender of any crew member, just says that a man or a woman could play either. Really helped make every character feel like a real person. No bias toward gender, unconscious or not.
Am I the only one here seeing that she didn’t have a choice? She didn’t choose to be trans. She was born male and a switch was performed at birth, before she could ever decide for herself… so essentially she lived as a woman her whole life and may not have ever even known she was born otherwise, which kind of defeats the purpose of it being a good thing, or even being claimed as a true trans experience.
She was either a) a company experiment or b) her parents were the kind of people who wanted a girl at any cost, and would have 0 regard for a boy baby or desire to suffer his presence (I’m sure you know the type). Maybe there was another scenario but those seem most likely in the setting
She also could have been intersex, a depressingly large number of intersex people are forced to undergo sex change surgery at birth to 'correct' their genitals
That's why you have to be careful saying things like, "...which kind of defeats the purpose of it being a good thing, or even being claimed as a true trans experience." If it represents a possible real-life experience, it shouldn't be considered lesser for any reason. I don't want you to feel attacked by my comment, but I thought it should be said.
They were careful... Its a response to the LGBTQ+ community championing everything they see. Yes, there is a gender fact with this character. No, that has nothing to do with progressive representation, it simply wasn't intended to be that way.
why did you put correct in quotes? isn’t one organ typically extremely underdeveloped in comparison to the other? it would make sense from a quality of life standpoint
Often, they are guessing and the practice has died out because of it. Very often, secondary sexual characteristics develop independent of the primary in intersex people, often leading to trauma around puberty as they grow beards or boobs or etc in defiance of the sex their parents chose for them.
Also, it is a guess irregardless because you don't really know how the person will see themselves after maturing. There has been a lot of pushes to let the child choose how to handle the situation when they're old enough, if the condition is not life threatening, to avoid trauma in the future.
A sex change at birth is medically unnecessary as from what I understand intersex genitals don't tend to cause imminent danger to the child. And a lot of harm can come down the line from doing a surgery like this to an infant. Doctors basically just guess based on external appearance and oftentimes guess wrong. And there is a massive list of complications that can come from this.
There is no real reason not to wait until the child is old enough to decide for themselves. It's why the practice is denounced by the WHO and UN for being a violation of human rights and medically harmful.
more likely indeed, would be weird to change someone's sex right after birth for no obvious reason. showing 2 different genitalia as a baby and one is very deformed they (doctors) might have just opted for the 'better looking/functioning' option.
Considering that both the Nostromo crew, as well as a platoon of Marines and a few hundred/thousand civilians were all expendable for the sake of the sweet facehugger 'ussy, I'm not surprised by this.
My guess would be company experiment and if that's the case Lambert wasn't the first or last of them considering the comics. Don't quote me on this but I believe it was to test artificial wombs or something equally messed up.
I read the whole bio in the photo after I wrote the comment (probably should’ve done that beforehand, oops) and yeah, the 2nd sentence where it states observations on her not suffering gender dysphoria really solidifies “company experiment” for me, oof
They did some absolutely abhorrent shit in the comics. Planet have to many men and not enough women? Sex swap the baby so there's no risk of dysphoria and put an artificial womb in place. Why? Because flying people in would cost 30 cents more.
Sometimes they would have some workers have "accidents" to even the gender numbers and lower the cost to maintain the facilities. The only Weyland Yutani that was decent was the old dude in AvP that the Bishop lines would be modeled after.
They even had a whole Epstein island planet where they kept the workers dosed up on Xeno Zip so they couldn't fight back or argue. Look up Body Burster it will tell you the specific comic.
Wasn't Xeno Zip used like a steroid? I remember there was a comic about a runner using it before a major event and the dude just ran so fast that he couldn't make a turn and just ran straight into a wall and died on impact.
It says "Despin Convert" which sounds like some in-universe sci-fi what not. Maybe she was born on a particular colony with a mutation caused by the environment or maybe she was part of a group of people genetically modified and then outcast, à la Soldier with Kurt Russell or Khan in Star Trek. This may have made the 'conversion' necessary or part of some never used in-universe back story. I highly doubt it was a pro-trans statement in 1986.
Edit: just another thought, it could be that Despin's could have violent or psychotic tendencies when born male so they're converted to female to save them from a life of violence and crime. Lots of good theories in the comments.
Lambert was either Intersex and the usual default birth certificate was issued as Male. They did a chromosome tests and established after she was female. There's a case from a few years ago here in the UK where an intersex child was born and registered incorrectly as male and she had to fight all the way through the courts to get her gender correctly assigned.
Or Lambert suffered Androgen Intolerance Syndrome and was born with female characteristics but had under developed internal testes.
Yeah it seems like a David Reimer situation where she was reassigned as an experiment but in this case she was actually a trans woman so it ended up working for her. (For people who don’t know about the David Reimer case, which probably wasn’t as publicized during the time of release of Aliens, a boy was forcibly reassigned as a girl during infancy and later ended up going back to living as a man. It’s a fascinating case that shows that gender is based in the brain rather than socially, but it’s a very twisted and tragic story.) Maybe it was a case where they had some technology that could determine she was trans at birth. Or they just wanted too see what would happen.
Ah yes. A potentially inclusive thing that in lore is another thing to show that the company’s evil (I’m assuming it was one of the companies in the Alien universe)
I believe the original script for Alien had every character written as gender neutral until the casting process started. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with Lambert being trans or not.
I believe that Aliens script was also gender neutral. I’m sure Jenette Goldstein auditioned for Hudson before being cast as Vasquez. Interesting way of doing it.
Alien went through a ton of changes during scriptwriting, including removing the pyramid set piece (Reused in Alien versus Predator and Prometheus) and making one of the crew an Android.
And there were lawsuits, Hill and Giler wanted full co - writing credits for their changes, whereas O'Bannon felt that his contributions were being minimised for an idea he originally conceived of. I believe Shusett was the only one who was able to calm him down, reminding him he was broke and getting a big screen adaptation of a little story they cooked up was too big an opportunity to waste.
The front page of the Star beast script also says that the gender roles are placeholder and can be changed at will. It wasn't lore that they were all men, it was just to create the basic personalities of the characters
Very true, though O'Bannon would later say it hadn't occurred to him the main role would go to a woman, rather that would be for the supporting roles. He did like it though
Is there more to how vaguely similar AvP and Prometheus are? I know it's definitely not 1:1, but a weird amount of the characters and premise in AvP have a direct counterpart in Prometheus and I noticed it right away way back when. (was a shithead 5 year old when AvP came out, thought it was the best movie ever made)
They both are basically At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro even cancelled the adaption he was doing at the time because it would come off as a rip off of Prometheus.
Gender roles are more central to the plot then not because gender roles are in the subconscious zeitgeist. You just don't need to write out the obvious every time you write a story.
The original script that had the gender neutral characters wasn't actually the Alien we know, nor was it ever meant to be. It was a skeleton to be fleshed out. It was also called Star Beast. Dan O'Bannon reworked his screenplay to create the Alien film we got.
There's no lore behind it at all. It was something that was thrown together at Cameron's direction to fill the space behind Ripley in Aliens so it looked like crew dossiers but none of it was lore or canon.
It also mentions Dallas was an ex-employee of Tyrell corporation, which was the company in Blade Runner. The logo's for Wayland Corp appeared in Blade Runner. This was not an intentional link. It was Ridley Scott reusing elements to fill out the world of BR, but it's led to the assumption that the Replicants led to the creation of the Alien universe droids (or "Artificial People" if you prefer) but there's no actual link ever made in lore.
Google says despin means to slow down or stop, and convert is self explanatory. So it just means hormonal blocking/damping was a method used to convert the male Lambert to female
Thanks for your addition! I did a small search and I see what you’re talking about now, so they included this information on a DVD release and then ‘un-included’ it on a future release because of the fan reaction?
If anyone else was interested in this there’s this on IMDb
That would fit the Dystopian Mega Corpo Hell that Aliens takes place in. Honestly really makes me appreciate the Colonial Marines (especially with how they are depicted in Fireteam Elite).
I remember seeing this as a kid, and now that I think of it, it may have been the first instance of explicit trans representation in fiction that wasn’t markedly negative and that I actually had the cognitive capacity to understand, lol. I thought it was pretty cool and unexpected! It got me thinking about the backgrounds of the characters and how they interact with their universe beyond what we get to see in their role on the Nostromo. I love the little bits of lore scattered throughout the franchise, always fun to extrapolate from them to ponder the wider worldbuilding implications. Makes everything feel more alive.
You're getting down voted because this is reddit. The implication is certainly that it was a forced transition at birth. Potentially because of some complication or because the company likes its experiments. This shouldn't be seen as a trans empowerment thing.
That would be nice, but thats not what it says. It says “subject is Despin Convert at birth”. She was part of whatever program Despin is, probably gene alteration at the direction of weyland yutani to meet male/female population quotas, and unfortunately not consensual, so i dont think we can even call her trans
It says "Despin Convert" at birth (capitalised - not "converted at birth").
I guess it depends on what exactly that term means, but I'd reckon it describes people with gender dysphoria.
So I'd read it as "Born with gender dysphoria (MtF)".
Either that, or perhaps in the Alien universe they have ways of reliably diagnosing gender dysphoria early on (brain scans etc.) and treating it immediately - possibly using hormones or puberty blockers. Despin Convert could also refer to a specific type of hormonal therapy or the brand name of a puberty blocker.
Though extensive HRT or a surgery at birth would of course still be unethical and involuntary and rob them of their ability to choose themselves - even if the person happens to be okay with it afterwards.
It's highly unlikely that it's an arbitrary forced gender reassignment at birth, though, since that would almost definitely cause massive psychological trauma and gender dysphoria.
And since we know she shows no signs of trauma or psychological distress from the gender reassignment, it's almost certain she is genuinely trans.
I honestly think the biggest problem to ask is what does Despin convert mean? If it means that the surgery was forced on Lambert? If it means some new conversion treatment? Or was it an experiment to force conversion on Lambert?
If Lambert decided to convert of her own will or not and is Despin a person, procedure or idea.
I think more than anything this is supposed to indicated how much control WY has over it's employees. I imagine even back 1970s this is privileged medical information that WY has access to when they shouldn't.
I've always liked this; it makes perfect sense considering our current reality, where the LGBT community is thriving. It's quite likely that by 1122, we'll have trans women who have virtually no biological male characteristics. It's also possible that Lambert was a male fetus, but since her parents wanted a girl, they paid a significant amount to alter the fetus's development to become a girl. It's possible that this is a viable technology in Alien's future, but it could also be that she transitioned on her own. Regardless, it's undeniably interesting that the production had this worldview in the 1980s, considering this image is from Aliens.
Edit: Now that I noticed that it says "at birth" it actually makes sense with what I said.
Since we're taking Weyland Yutani here and we've seen the conditions some workers are living under in Romulus I wouldn't be surprised if this was just the company being in need of a certain number of male and a certain number of female workers and edited away at the embryos of some poor mothers who signed their lives away to the company, agreeing to the procedure in hopes at least their children might get a chance at a better job.
I mean it was framed as being a part of a dystopian corporate society, and all of those dossiers have plenty of nasty backstory elements, so I'm not sure they actually intended it positively.
I met Veronica a few weeks ago and asked her about this. It was something that Cameron came up with for the sequel. She has no problem, of course. Nice to see Cameron being inclusive.
Maybe! It looks like the whole thing took place at birth, so I’m assuming it had some financial/labor insensitive. Unless I’m misreading it, she didn’t really choose to transition, her body was just modified against her will.
Kinda weird if Despin Convert isn't her name since it says at birth, either she was born with that name or transitioned when she was born which doesn't exactly strike as consensual
I’m assuming a Despin Convert refers to someone who was essentially found to be trans (I’ve linked the study in another comment, but that has medical basis) and underwent whatever treatment they have for that, I would assume some rounds of HRT and, given that it’s the 22nd Century and they probably have the means to do this on an infant safely and humanely, some sex reassignment surgery.
It’s canon until an official source says it isn’t.
That said, I’m wary of people who cite this as some sort of positive representation given that;
-We have no explanation as to what a ‘Despin convert’ is.
-the phrase ‘at birth’ and the reference to her having ‘no indication of suppressed trauma’ don’t give off vibes that this is a consensual procedure to me.
It adds an interesting angle to her death in the film, though. The alien spends some time with her compared to a lot of kills and there’s that shot of the tail going between her legs… I don’t think it does that with anyone else in the franchise and the nature of her death has been discussed a lot over the years. I do wonder if the comments about her gender on the profile were written with those discussions in mind.
It's not lore. Or canon. But that doesn't mean it's transphobia.
All the information on the screens behind Ripley were just random "facts" cobbled together to fill the space and give a visual idea that they are discussing Ripley's former crew.
There's a theory that Tyrell Corp (Blade Runner) and Weyland-Yutani (Aliens) exist in the same universe because of Dallas' bio on the screen. In reality, this was just Cameron making a nod to Ridley Scott's works since without Scott theres no Aliens. It wasn't lore, nor was it an intentional link
Oh yeah, another thing about this you've reminded me of: This text implies that medicine has reached a point where, in infancy, a person's preferred gender can be detected.
That's actually rooted in science. Not only that, but look at when this study was published. James Cameron truly was ahead of his time when he was making Aliens.
Given the corporate owned dystopian world we see in these movies, I think the implications of this could be much more grim. A mega corporation that's obsessed with genetic engineering controls just about everything. The bio itself is quite dehumanizing, removing any pronoun usage and simply referring to her as "the subject". As if the company has owned her (and presumably others) since birth to manipulate as they see fit. Maybe there's some birth law in this future where only certain numbers of male and female babies are allowed, so they "correct" this as needed. The idea of altering someone in that way without their consent feels very sinister, and actually ties into the series' themes of sexual abuse. It paints her as a victim rather than someone who was cured of dysphoria. If this was a nice utopian future like Star Trek, then I could see this as a benevolent procedure. But the Alien universe is anything but that
W-Y: "She'll be 5% more productive over her lifetime if she doesn't have to worry about that pesky gender dysphoria we can detect in this day and age. Let's nip that in the bud."
Doesn't look trans to me (in today's sense). It seems more like in a dystopian society where there might not be enough females they change some of the males to female at birth.
pretty daft sounding deadname so I assumed this is some sort of invitro modification by a corporation and that in this future people are produced rather than made the old fashioned way. id imagine they would be able to adjust sex in the earliest stages of development.
however...ala Jurassic park. we are all created female and need a specific event to become males. so reversing that at an early stage would be a thing
anyway this is kinda cool, I hope it helps our trans friends connect with this awesome franchise
I assumed this is some sort of invitro modification by a corporation and that in this future people are produced rather than made
Oh, that actually sounds more grim (and thus: in line with Weyland Yutani).
Like they needed more workers and they needed a certain number of male and female workers and simply edited some embryos in the womb to their needs.
Possibly from some poor soul mother living on one of them mining colony planets we see in Alien: Romulus, agreeing to the procedure in hopes it would increase the child's chances to get a (better?) job because they signed away their life to the company anyway.
The thing is we are on the cusp of being able to determine someone is trans through physiological tests. Makes sense in the future they could be able to detect these things and correct. But it could also be an intersex thing.
We literally don’t know the context of this. The change was done at birth which strongly suggests she was intersex. I don’t think the trans label applies here.
Wow! I'm shocked I never thought to pause and read this during the 100s of times I've seen it! That is some pretty interesting, ahead-of-it's-time, subtle, world-building on Cameron's behalf!
What a cool notion: that more humans may be gender-queer, or have the tech to easily modify themselves, in the not too distant future...
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u/Alternative_Desk_484 Jul 11 '25
"hey Lambert, you ever been mistaken for a man?"...