How Aliens Broke Sci-Fi Ground Through Lambert
One of the more interesting hidden-in-plain-sight details from the "Alien" franchise is how James Cameron's "Aliens" established that Veronica Cartwright's character in "Alien" was trans. We get a glimpse of Lambert's personnel file during a heated meeting between Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the Weyland-Yutani head honchos, and while it's only a flash on the screen, her file clearly states that she transitioned from male to female at birth and suffered no "trauma related to gender alteration."
Who is responsible for that bit of information? Is it James Cameron himself, the writer and director of the film, who is known for his stringent attention to detail? Maybe. It could also have been the art director or anybody in that department who was tasked with making the graphic displayed in this scene.
Whoever it was ended up doing kind of a groundbreaking thing, especially for 1986, when the world was in the grips of gay panic and the AIDS epidemic was running rampant. Establishing a well-known character from a massive movie as transgender was a bold move, but it, surprisingly, has roots to the very beginning of this franchise.
In the original screenplay for "Alien," Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett intentionally wrote all the characters to be genderless. They don't break down in traditional male and female archetypes. Even though O'Bannon used male pronouns for every single crew member in the script, he made sure to include a note that stated unequivocally that the crew were unisex and that all parts were interchangeable for men or women.
Lambert isn't defined by her gender
If I had to guess, I'd say that was less about O'Bannon and Shusett making a grand statement on gender identity and more about allowing freedom for casting, but whatever the intent was the result was they ended up casting Sigourney Weaver as Ripley and Veronica Cartwright as Lambert and didn't rewrite them to be more traditionally feminine. They're just members of the crew, no different from their male counterparts. All that added up to an interesting dynamic in which the audience couldn't lean on their expectations for how certain male or female roles usually play out in movies like this.
Yes, we do get a gratuitous underwear scene with Ripley in the last act, but that could have just as easily been Tom Skerritt in his boxers had the casting gone in a different direction.
What we're left with after the reveal in "Aliens" is an extra added dimension to Lambert as a character. She is trans, yes, but that also isn't her defining characteristic. She's just a person who was the shocked face and terrified eyes of the audience through all the horrors of that first movie and that's all she had to be.
Maybe someday we'll get to a point where that is the norm and a person's ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender are just seen as small details of their overall individuality and not the main takeaway for viewers.