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A Brief History of Transgender Representation in Star Trek

Partial spoiler warnings for TOS episode “Metamorphosis”, TNG episodes “The Outcast” and “The Host”, DS9 episode “Blood Oath”, and DIS episode “Forget Me Not”.

Star Trek has been radically racially inclusive since the beginning. It’s also mostly been ahead of its time on issues of equality between men and women. But it took a while to get to a good place when it comes to portrayals of nonbinary or transgender individuals.

Viewed through a modern lens, the early series have a bizarre tendency to assume and center a male/female gender binary even beyond the limits of life as we know it. For example, in The Original Series episode “Metamorphosis” from 1967, Captain Kirk explains how an alien that is essentially a cloud of electrified gas could have fallen in love with a human man by claiming that it is female. “The idea of male and female are universal constants,” says Kirk.

By the time of The Next Generation, Kirk would be proven wrong. The episode “The Outcast” features a species called the J’naii who are humanoid and androgynous. In the course of the episode, the J’naii scientist Soren works closely with the Enterprise’s Commander Riker, giving them ample opportunity to discuss their cultures' differing views on gender.

Soren and Riker in Ten Forward

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What Makes Star Trek Special?

In October of 1962, my mother was thirteen years old. One evening, she was watching the news on TV with her parents and her two brothers when President Kennedy came on to address the nation. He said that the US had discovered that the Soviet Union was deploying ballistic missiles to Cuba, close enough to American soil that they could easily target most of the continental US. Kennedy said that any such missile launched from Cuba would be seen as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States and would trigger full retaliation.

President Kennedy addresses the nation

This was when the public became aware of what we now call the Cuban Missile Crisis. It only lasted a few weeks, but it was one of the scariest periods of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, nearly resulting in a nuclear exchange multiple times. To us, this is history, and we know that despite the close calls civilization survived this era more or less intact, but that was far from guaranteed at the time. Certainly to my young mother watching these events unfold as she tried to live her life as a normal teenager, it seemed that the world was about to plunge into full-on nuclear war, and she might never have a chance to grow up.

In September 1966, four more years into the Cold War, the National Broadcasting Company aired the first episode of a new show called Star Trek. It was the first American science fiction series with a regular cast that was aimed at adults. Like a lot of sci-fi, it used its futuristic setting to indirectly explore and comment on real-world issues, but where a lot of sci-fi did so via cautionary tales examining how things can go wrong and what dark places that might take us, Star Trek did so via aspirational tales, examining how things could go right and what a bright future might look like. At a time when it was difficult to be optimistic and it seemed like humanity was about to destroy itself over nationalistic squabbles, Star Trek showed a vision where not only had humanity survived, but it had come together to explore the stars.

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