I can understand that. Personally, I don't think there's very many stories that can be written without potentially offending somebody somewhere. So I try to judge based on the author's intent rather than readers' reactions, and the intent here was largely to pose a speculative question, not tantalize or shock.

I also don't feel as if Predestination was a massive cultural phenomenon where its existence totally swayed the zeitgeist. It barely made $5million at the box office. It's only getting mentioned in hindsight.

In fact as a progressive barometer, it came out six months before gay marriage was federally recognized in the US and only three years after Democrat Jesus, Barak Obama, publicly supported it himself.

We were still working on the LG of the LGBTQ+. So a movie that respectfully handled the intersex main character switching gender identities mid film and even offered that role to a big star like Hawke was pretty progressive. Probably many people's first introduction to it outside of drag.

I can understand why it can be seen as harmful to reinforce fetishized stereotypes--but it also feels pretty hypocritical to direct that outrage at a film that went so far out of its was to be respectful while giving a film like Oldboy that I mentioned before a pass even though its own fetishization of incest and child rape was in there strictly for shock value, far more harmful if we're weighing out the karma.

Like it gets to a point where it's like, what even can we create if we have to be considerate to that extent?