Re: Star Trek and Transgenderism
My bet is that a number of us have Mary Sues (*cough* Ylis *cough*) running around our ships. :)
Star Trek and Transgenderism
SiranNataan
Mike111
Re: Star Trek and Transgenderism
Very good writing. There's an endless coolness about Betazoids. How does their telepathy/empathy work? Betazoids also have a public mind space and a separate walled mind space that they keep private from other Betazoids. While some other telepathic species share everything with each other and nothing is private or hidden.
Betazoids are also very emotional. It makes you wonder how a Betazoid would get along with a Vulcan, Vulcan's also being telepathic in a way but also very emotionally suppressed and controlled. So many questions. It's just a really interesting species. But.. /end geekgasm
Betazoids are also very emotional. It makes you wonder how a Betazoid would get along with a Vulcan, Vulcan's also being telepathic in a way but also very emotionally suppressed and controlled. So many questions. It's just a really interesting species. But.. /end geekgasm
Nova
Re: Star Trek and Transgenderism
Thanks, SiranNataan!
Nova, care to describe what you think is unrealistic or hackneyed? I'm certainly up for specific constructive criticism.
I'll be glad to do so after work. It will be later tonight.
Nova
Re: Star Trek and Transgenderism
I'm home from work now, so I have some time to provide the analysis you've asked me for. This is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather just the things that jump out at me right away.
First of all, the idea that this is a speech to be delivered is a problem. To whom is it to be delivered, and on what occasion? Without a setting in which the speech is necessary, it's really just a long exercise in self-justification. I get that trans people face the need to justify themselves on a regular basis (a woefully too-regular basis, really), but I'm not sure it's the best choice here. You see, this leads me to the main issue which is that in the Star Trek setting, it's probably unlikely that the self-justification speech would even have to be delivered in the first place.
For starters, the Star Trek setting in general is broadly a tolerant one, where people have set aside their petty differences and mostly work together, at least within the worlds of the Federation. Given the advances that trans people have made in just a handful of decades in the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st, it seems silly to assume that trans people are a burning issue anywhere in the Federation by the time of the Star Trek setting. Gene Roddenberry deliberately made his bridge crew as multi-cultural as possible within the constraints of 1960's television production. He envisioned a world where all the little differences between people mattered not at all, but where the most important distinction was the content of their character.
On Betazed specifically, it seems that the issue of trans people should be especially a non-starter. They are a race of telepathic empaths. If anything, they would be showing the less-emotionally developed races of the Federation how it's done, not the other way around. An entire species of people who are constantly skimming the emotions of the people around them would certainly be far more understanding of trans people. For that matter, in a species of telepathic empaths, how could any minority group ever even be closeted in the first place?
This runs headlong against some of the autobiographical information contained in the story. For example, for an emotionally mature species of empathic telepaths, why would a trans person being a relative of a member of the ruling caste be an issue at all, let alone one that would "bring strife to an otherwise peaceful society?" The Betazed are supposed to be the mature empaths. There's no room for ignorant bigotry in such a society, and along the way to creating their peaceful society, such ignorance and bigotry would have been stamped out in the distant past.
Enough of that. I could write for days about the above alone, but there's a few other things I'd like to touch on as well.
The use of 20th Century science fiction as a symbol bothers me. However, I'll give you a pass on it because you're not doing anything that the entire rest of the collected body of authors of the entire Star Trek universe doesn't do too. To wit, why is the 20th Century so fascinating to the people in the Star Trek setting? With all of history to choose from, why does Star Trek lore always come back to the 20th Century when they want to show their future people being interested in their past? It's because that's when the people who are writing the stories are alive. We want to think that we're awesome, so much so that the people of the future will find us fascinating.
Also, there's the problem that the art, literature, cinema, and music of the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd Centuries have not been created yet! We'd have to use our puny turn-of-the-millennium brains to imagine the art of the near future so that the people of the distant future could be nostalgic for it. (And if there's one thing that we've found again and again, it is that any serious attempt to extrapolate the art of the future, even just the future a few decades away, is almost always hilariously wrong. In the 1930's they thought everything in the 1950's would be streamlined like the fastest trains, and driven by propellers and pneumatic tubes. In the 1950's they thought everything in the 1980's would have rockets and fins on it. In the 1980's they thought everything in the early 2000's would be day-glow colored and made of spandex and vinyl.* And so on.)
Speaking of the future, does anyone have surgery anymore? The impression I get from Star Trek is that almost every major health issue, particularly non-emergencies (like having a Nausican stick a knife through your heart) can be fixed with a wave of a magic medical tech device. I'm not sure this would be the pivotal event in the life of a Star Trek person's life the way it is in modern times.
And that leads me to this: I really think the whole story is a literal projection of a very specific modern cultural issue into a future setting where it simply doesn't fit. When Roddenberry wanted to talk about race in the Star Trek setting, he didn't emerge from the writer's room with a script about a planet where white people and black people still wanted to mess each other's shit up just for being white and black. He had a mixed-race bridge on the Enterprise, after all. So if a ship of the Federation was integrated and it was no big deal, why would it be a big deal on a member world of the Federation? Instead he made the famous people who are black on one side and white on the other, and their counterparts who are white on one side and black on the other. Surely there is some kind of allegory for being transsexual that could be projected into the Star Trek setting so that it fits better.
I've gone on overlong, so I just want to address one more thing. The author insertion character being a member of the ruling family of an entire planet, the same character being close enough to a canon character (Riker) to be a sort of protege', the bit about Ambassador Troi having a hand in the author character taking on the name of her very own daughter-- it's all very Mary Sue. That's all I want to say about that.
* I'm still sad that this didn't happen.
First of all, the idea that this is a speech to be delivered is a problem. To whom is it to be delivered, and on what occasion? Without a setting in which the speech is necessary, it's really just a long exercise in self-justification. I get that trans people face the need to justify themselves on a regular basis (a woefully too-regular basis, really), but I'm not sure it's the best choice here. You see, this leads me to the main issue which is that in the Star Trek setting, it's probably unlikely that the self-justification speech would even have to be delivered in the first place.
For starters, the Star Trek setting in general is broadly a tolerant one, where people have set aside their petty differences and mostly work together, at least within the worlds of the Federation. Given the advances that trans people have made in just a handful of decades in the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st, it seems silly to assume that trans people are a burning issue anywhere in the Federation by the time of the Star Trek setting. Gene Roddenberry deliberately made his bridge crew as multi-cultural as possible within the constraints of 1960's television production. He envisioned a world where all the little differences between people mattered not at all, but where the most important distinction was the content of their character.
On Betazed specifically, it seems that the issue of trans people should be especially a non-starter. They are a race of telepathic empaths. If anything, they would be showing the less-emotionally developed races of the Federation how it's done, not the other way around. An entire species of people who are constantly skimming the emotions of the people around them would certainly be far more understanding of trans people. For that matter, in a species of telepathic empaths, how could any minority group ever even be closeted in the first place?
This runs headlong against some of the autobiographical information contained in the story. For example, for an emotionally mature species of empathic telepaths, why would a trans person being a relative of a member of the ruling caste be an issue at all, let alone one that would "bring strife to an otherwise peaceful society?" The Betazed are supposed to be the mature empaths. There's no room for ignorant bigotry in such a society, and along the way to creating their peaceful society, such ignorance and bigotry would have been stamped out in the distant past.
Enough of that. I could write for days about the above alone, but there's a few other things I'd like to touch on as well.
The use of 20th Century science fiction as a symbol bothers me. However, I'll give you a pass on it because you're not doing anything that the entire rest of the collected body of authors of the entire Star Trek universe doesn't do too. To wit, why is the 20th Century so fascinating to the people in the Star Trek setting? With all of history to choose from, why does Star Trek lore always come back to the 20th Century when they want to show their future people being interested in their past? It's because that's when the people who are writing the stories are alive. We want to think that we're awesome, so much so that the people of the future will find us fascinating.
Also, there's the problem that the art, literature, cinema, and music of the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd Centuries have not been created yet! We'd have to use our puny turn-of-the-millennium brains to imagine the art of the near future so that the people of the distant future could be nostalgic for it. (And if there's one thing that we've found again and again, it is that any serious attempt to extrapolate the art of the future, even just the future a few decades away, is almost always hilariously wrong. In the 1930's they thought everything in the 1950's would be streamlined like the fastest trains, and driven by propellers and pneumatic tubes. In the 1950's they thought everything in the 1980's would have rockets and fins on it. In the 1980's they thought everything in the early 2000's would be day-glow colored and made of spandex and vinyl.* And so on.)
Speaking of the future, does anyone have surgery anymore? The impression I get from Star Trek is that almost every major health issue, particularly non-emergencies (like having a Nausican stick a knife through your heart) can be fixed with a wave of a magic medical tech device. I'm not sure this would be the pivotal event in the life of a Star Trek person's life the way it is in modern times.
And that leads me to this: I really think the whole story is a literal projection of a very specific modern cultural issue into a future setting where it simply doesn't fit. When Roddenberry wanted to talk about race in the Star Trek setting, he didn't emerge from the writer's room with a script about a planet where white people and black people still wanted to mess each other's shit up just for being white and black. He had a mixed-race bridge on the Enterprise, after all. So if a ship of the Federation was integrated and it was no big deal, why would it be a big deal on a member world of the Federation? Instead he made the famous people who are black on one side and white on the other, and their counterparts who are white on one side and black on the other. Surely there is some kind of allegory for being transsexual that could be projected into the Star Trek setting so that it fits better.
I've gone on overlong, so I just want to address one more thing. The author insertion character being a member of the ruling family of an entire planet, the same character being close enough to a canon character (Riker) to be a sort of protege', the bit about Ambassador Troi having a hand in the author character taking on the name of her very own daughter-- it's all very Mary Sue. That's all I want to say about that.
* I'm still sad that this didn't happen.
lilithvf1998
Re: Star Trek and Transgenderism
Thank you very much for all that feedback. I've got a burlesque show tomorrow so I may not respond to every point.
Most of this, I think, is fair criticism, and I want to point out that this is NOT an attempt to write a Mary Sue--aside from this forum I'm not interested in publishing it--as much as an exercise for developing my character's background, which is not unusual in roleplay and as far as I'm concerned has its place in MMORPGs as much as any other RPG. Also, I'm not fully satisfied with the hand-waving that explains why trans folk are invisible in the Star Trek world, and was trying to come up with a way to explain this to my own satisfaction.
Of course I agree that Roddenberry had envisioned an egalitarian world, but I think it's rather presumptuous to think that the entirety of Federation space is equally egalitarian, without exception. It's an ideal--one pursued as far as practical, but an ideal nonetheless. It really isn't a stretch to presume that, say, earth has resolved its issues with trans folk, but other Federation worlds may not have.
And I'm not particularly convinced that Betazoids are automatically more enlightened, or that they're without their bigotries--especially when Deanna Troi's own grandfather thought poorly of races that relied on speech and insisted provincially upon communicating telepathically. (See http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deanna_Troi#Early_life_and_career for citation. It reminds me of one of my great-grandmothers, who only spoke Scots Gaelic. Oh, she UNDERSTOOD English just fine, but she refused to speak it.) So if the bio of a well-known canon Betazoid character suggests bias isn't unknown on Betazed, why insist that they can't also be biased against trans folk? Besides, how do we know that being transgender isn't more common among humans--my character being 1/4 human--than among the Betazoids? Maybe among them it's such a rare thing to be trans that they've always treated it aberrantly and severely. We don't know.
And we don't know because--as I was trying to point out before--transgender folk, at least among humans, are invisible in the Star Trek universe. It's far more likely to come up among non-human species, some of which aren't even Federation. It's not discussed at all, so we don't know what the situation regarding trans folk is, anywhere in the Federation. Again, egalitarian ideals are just ideals, and while race and nationality was quite visible in Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek, we LGBT folk aren't--and I dare say trans folk are even less visible. So who knows which species have some transgender behavior? In Star Trek, it's apparently all or nothing.
As for surgery--of course surgery exists. Surgeries to make Starfleet officers resemble other humanoid races as part of covert operations is a fairly routine thing. (See http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cosmetic_surgery for a few dozen examples.) While surgery to replace organs is a thing of the past, it would seem that surgery still exists for other reasons. It's not a stretch to presume trans folk would undergo some sort of surgical modification if they needed it for their well-being.
You've got a point about 20th Century earth culture and the Star Trek obsession with it. I may as well point out that I name my ships after SF stories--the USS Nova Express, the USS Lilith's Brood, and the USS Lathe of Heaven. Classy names, methinks. At any rate, this is my attempt to explain that naming scheme and tie it into my character. But that's not just *my* obsession, to be fair. My take on the matter is that the 20th Century, culturally speaking, was a turning point. It ended with a devastating war that threatened to pull humanity into a new dark ages, and therefore it was the default starting point for the renaissance that followed World War III, just as Greco-Roman culture was the default starting point for the European Renaissance after Europe had plunged into its own dark age. Granted, it's a bit hand-wavy, but that's rather hard to avoid for any SF author working within the parameters of a world derived from what we, here and now, would recognize, and Roddenberry went there well before I did.
As for your final comment--that, I fully admit, was laziness on my part, because while I could've invented an Admiral to be my adviser, it seemed worthwhile to have one who was known to be close to the Betazed people--close enough to marry one, at any rate. And for all my research, I simply could not find out enough about Betazed culture and notable characters in its history to tie my character's family into that with conviction--I would have needed to invent a whole family tree for that to work. So for expediency's sake I made my character a somewhat distant relative of a canon character. (Mary) Sue me. :P ;)
And, to reiterate--this is ONLY for my character development, and also to address some issues with the lack of visibility of trans folk in the Star Trek universe, to my satisfaction. I wouldn't even count this as fanfic, personally.
Most of this, I think, is fair criticism, and I want to point out that this is NOT an attempt to write a Mary Sue--aside from this forum I'm not interested in publishing it--as much as an exercise for developing my character's background, which is not unusual in roleplay and as far as I'm concerned has its place in MMORPGs as much as any other RPG. Also, I'm not fully satisfied with the hand-waving that explains why trans folk are invisible in the Star Trek world, and was trying to come up with a way to explain this to my own satisfaction.
Of course I agree that Roddenberry had envisioned an egalitarian world, but I think it's rather presumptuous to think that the entirety of Federation space is equally egalitarian, without exception. It's an ideal--one pursued as far as practical, but an ideal nonetheless. It really isn't a stretch to presume that, say, earth has resolved its issues with trans folk, but other Federation worlds may not have.
And I'm not particularly convinced that Betazoids are automatically more enlightened, or that they're without their bigotries--especially when Deanna Troi's own grandfather thought poorly of races that relied on speech and insisted provincially upon communicating telepathically. (See http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deanna_Troi#Early_life_and_career for citation. It reminds me of one of my great-grandmothers, who only spoke Scots Gaelic. Oh, she UNDERSTOOD English just fine, but she refused to speak it.) So if the bio of a well-known canon Betazoid character suggests bias isn't unknown on Betazed, why insist that they can't also be biased against trans folk? Besides, how do we know that being transgender isn't more common among humans--my character being 1/4 human--than among the Betazoids? Maybe among them it's such a rare thing to be trans that they've always treated it aberrantly and severely. We don't know.
And we don't know because--as I was trying to point out before--transgender folk, at least among humans, are invisible in the Star Trek universe. It's far more likely to come up among non-human species, some of which aren't even Federation. It's not discussed at all, so we don't know what the situation regarding trans folk is, anywhere in the Federation. Again, egalitarian ideals are just ideals, and while race and nationality was quite visible in Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek, we LGBT folk aren't--and I dare say trans folk are even less visible. So who knows which species have some transgender behavior? In Star Trek, it's apparently all or nothing.
As for surgery--of course surgery exists. Surgeries to make Starfleet officers resemble other humanoid races as part of covert operations is a fairly routine thing. (See http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cosmetic_surgery for a few dozen examples.) While surgery to replace organs is a thing of the past, it would seem that surgery still exists for other reasons. It's not a stretch to presume trans folk would undergo some sort of surgical modification if they needed it for their well-being.
You've got a point about 20th Century earth culture and the Star Trek obsession with it. I may as well point out that I name my ships after SF stories--the USS Nova Express, the USS Lilith's Brood, and the USS Lathe of Heaven. Classy names, methinks. At any rate, this is my attempt to explain that naming scheme and tie it into my character. But that's not just *my* obsession, to be fair. My take on the matter is that the 20th Century, culturally speaking, was a turning point. It ended with a devastating war that threatened to pull humanity into a new dark ages, and therefore it was the default starting point for the renaissance that followed World War III, just as Greco-Roman culture was the default starting point for the European Renaissance after Europe had plunged into its own dark age. Granted, it's a bit hand-wavy, but that's rather hard to avoid for any SF author working within the parameters of a world derived from what we, here and now, would recognize, and Roddenberry went there well before I did.
As for your final comment--that, I fully admit, was laziness on my part, because while I could've invented an Admiral to be my adviser, it seemed worthwhile to have one who was known to be close to the Betazed people--close enough to marry one, at any rate. And for all my research, I simply could not find out enough about Betazed culture and notable characters in its history to tie my character's family into that with conviction--I would have needed to invent a whole family tree for that to work. So for expediency's sake I made my character a somewhat distant relative of a canon character. (Mary) Sue me. :P ;)
And, to reiterate--this is ONLY for my character development, and also to address some issues with the lack of visibility of trans folk in the Star Trek universe, to my satisfaction. I wouldn't even count this as fanfic, personally.