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Fandom and fanfiction get a lot of credit for "subversive" approaches to gender and sexuality when I'm not sure a lot of it is that subversive -- or at least, it could be more subversive. A lot of Omegaverse, for instance, is just traditional gender roles but with a gay couple instead, where alphas are treated like men are in patriarchal societies and omegas like women. What's really all that new or subversive about that? It's no wonder a lot of people just use it to put their same-gender OTP in Regency England or whatever. What about stuff that rethinks those gendered roles entirely? Or a society where sex, gender and/or sexuality just are not ways that people (or whatever group we're talking about here) have categorized themselves at all -- which doesn't mean other stuff, other hierarchies, don't exist!
This is also a problem with a lot of original sci-fi and fantasy. And this is a thing I'm trying to explore in the original novel I've told you about: where a group of, especially, LGBTQ people and POC and women living in 1960s America and Britain get access to an alien world where none of that shit matters and envision it as a progressive utopia, get so invested in that that they're blind to the ways that it actually is very oppressive in completely different ways, along axes that don't exist in human cultures. And like, it's hard! It's really fucking hard to write that! It's like how fish can't imagine a world without water; we are the fish and patriarchy, colonialism, etc. are the water that surround us. It's really hard to see beyond that water, but a lot of the subversive power of fiction and particularly speculative fiction is the potential to do that. So I get why people don't do that, but I do wish they'd stop patting themselves on the back like they did it anyway (and I wish we'd give more credit to the writers who are trying or have tried to genuinely break new ground there, like Octavia Butler as @larkandkatydid has pointed out before)
Star Trek fandom has been really eye-opening about that. Because with some exceptions (like the Ferengi), there's nothing in "alpha canon" (as in, the official shows/movies, not apocrypha like books -- sidenote, the fact that Star Trek and Star Wars have "official texts" and "apocrypha" like the fucking Bible is a fascinating topic for another day) that requires you to assume that most of those alien cultures follow traditional human (and particularly Western) patriarchal gender roles. From what we see of Cardassia, for instance, there's no reason to assume they would have any compunctions about abortion or birth control and a lot of reasons to think they wouldn't: the planet has long-standing problems with resource scarcity, women are in charge of the medical field and scientific research, and actual filicide is permitted and even encouraged as a way to cover up shameful sexual affairs. And yet people just see "authoritarian culture with big emphasis on family" and assume it has to be like Nazi Germany or modern American Christian nationalists... but why does it? Why does "focus on the family" need to mean the same thing in an alien culture that it does in patriarchal Earth cultures? I think it's important to ask these questions, because otherwise we risk suggesting that stuff like misogyny and homophobia -- or even specific manifestations of them -- are "natural" and destined to rise up in any culture, but that's not true and it's very important for feminists and other progressive moments to insist that that is not true (and that we can and shall overcome this shit in our own societies).
I fully see the appeal of working out your issues with growing up female/gay/trans/etc. in our shitty patriarchal society by having your alien blorbo deal with that in fanfiction. I just wish people would not pretend it's something other than it is, and I wish we wouldn't act like this is the limit of what it means to "be subversive about" or "deal with" gender and sexuality in speculative fiction when there are a lot of other approaches we could take that are, ultimately, a lot more liberatory. Also, people do the same fucking thing with other hierarchies -- class in particular, but that's a whole 'nother rant lol