Reflecting on the conversations about Doctor Who and gender that always flare up when the lead actor is leaving, showrunner Steven Moffat recently wrote in Doctor Who Monthly: “Science-fiction is notoriously male. You can tell that because everyone wears uniforms and marches around talking about rules. But Doctor Who has always felt to me rather female. It’s full of kindness and compassion and eccentricity and wisdom instead of violence.” His sentiments chime with the current state of sci-fi on telly, which has shifted its gaze from the male to the female.

In The OA, a group of misfit schoolkids find commonality and defeat wrongdoing through the medium of interpretive dance. In Sense8, a group of people across the globe start experiencing each other’s feelings. In Falling Water, three strangers get caught up in each other’s dreams. In Outlander, a genteel 1940s woman finds herself zapped back to Jacobite Scotland and finds connection with a Highlander. All without a raygun in sight.

“When questioning whether the genre is being ‘queered’, I would argue that sci-fi has always been an inherently queer genre,” says academic and Stonewall advocate Emily E Roach. “It has provided the space for queer potential because the worlds of sci-fi are often the ones where socially imposed constructs of gender and sexuality don’t exist.”

It’s also no coincidence that these bigger themes are getting room to flourish in an age of binge-viewing. “On television, we have the opportunity to tell more slow-burning, character-driven sci-fi stories,” says Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer on USA Network’s Falling Water. “A lot of summer blockbuster films rely on visual effects and plots of destroy the world.”

At the heart of Netflix’s Sense8 is the idea of identity fluidity and commonality; it seems relevant that two of its creators, the Wachowski siblings, have both transitioned. Even when the show provided us with an eye-popping orgy scene last season, it was less about the sex and more about intimacy and interconnectivity.

Sci-fi and especially Sense8 are giving us an exploration of sexuality and gender beyond the binary Emily E Roach

Tina Desai as Kala and Max Riemelt as Wolfgang in Sense8.

Max Riemelt, who plays Wolfgang Bogdanow, the show’s gangstery German contingent, says that he sees a profundity in the show’s most explicit scene. “With most sex scenes the association is not about ‘making love’ any more,” he says.

“But what Lana Wachowski managed to achieve was a really positive example of a sex scene. She was trying to tell the other side of the story, to show that we could push boundaries of what that type of scene could be and make it more of a spiritual experience.”

These ideas of connectivity and gender fluidity are underlined by co-creator J Michael Straczynski, who told the Independent: “One thing that [the Wachowskis and I] have in common is the belief that tyranny succeeds when it manages to divide us along gender, party or other lines. We feel strongly that we’re better together than we are apart, that what binds us – the common coin of our shared humanity, our dreams and hopes, is stronger and more important than what divides us.”

Through its central premise and execution, Roach thinks that Sense8 is particularly important. “Sci-fi and especially Sense8 are giving us an exploration of sexuality and gender beyond the binary,” she says. “When many television shows are getting LGBT representation wrong, Sense8 is a bold and interesting change.”

As well being lauded as the Scottish Game of Thrones, Outlander makes for a “bold and interesting” change for a sci-fi show: one specifically made for a female audience. “Apparently, it was incredibly groundbreaking that [Outlander] would feature narratives that women wanted to see,” says Diana Gabaldon, who wrote the first novel in her Outlander series back in 1991, “which caused me to wonder what kind of rocks entertainment people live under.”

Perhaps, as The OA co-creator Brit Marling noted recently, sci-fi’s move from male to more traditionally female landscapes mirrors a generational and gender shift.

“[Showmakers are] drawing from the same ether,” she told NME. “Young people making things around the same time from the same generation, feeling similar sentiments about the importance of friendship … I think it’s actually quite beautiful; it means we’re all hunting around the same thing.”

Science fiction has always veered between presenting a nightmarish dystopia and a kinder future that you might call a utopia. As reality feels as if it’s veering dangerously close to the former, the latter might be a comforting place to lose ourselves in awhile – however you identify.

Season two of Sense8 is available to stream on Netflix; Falling Water and Outlander are available to stream on Amazon Prime