Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise has a long and poor history with including the LGBTQ community as part of its stated agenda of representing an idealized progressive vision of the world. This is hardly the works’ only failure to live up to its intended themes, but it is a particularly consistent throughline in its entire history and run, starting with Roddenberry telling George Takei that they could not afford to include a homosexual presence in the original series while already in such conflict with the network over how subversive they were presently attempting to be. This would be far from the last time that the LGBTQ community would be asked to wait, as plans came up with each subsequent series for at least one major character to be a member of the community, (Geordi La Forge, Dax and Elim Garak, Captain Janeway, Malcolm Reed) and every time this was obstructed by executives and Rick Berman, who took over control of Star Trek between Roddenberry’s passing and the end of Enterprise. The Next Generation’s misaimed attempt of couching a metaphorical commentary on homosexual rights, which quickly hit a minefield of transgender themes instead, was merely another chapter of this troubled history.

“Some people move away from their birth-assigned gender because they feel strongly that they properly belong to another gender in which it would be better for them to live; others want to strike out toward some new location, some space not yet clearly defined or concretely occupied; still others simply feel the need to get away from the conventional expectations bound up with the gender that was initially put upon them” (Stryker 1). This is an effectively broad conveyance of experience under the transgender umbrella, and understanding it in light of viewing The Outcast underlines that the episode fundamentally engages with themes of trans identity and experience, deliberately or not. In the episode, First Officer Riker must collaborate with Soren, an engineer and copilot from the J’naii people, in search of a J’naii shuttle lost in what is called a pocket of null space. Riker and Soren begin to develop a mutual chemistry with each other despite the teachings of Soren’s people. The J’naii are described alternately as having no gender and being collectively androgynous, which equates two different subsets of non-binary and gender non-conforming (GNC) identity operating under the trans umbrella, namely gender ambiguity and fluidity versus being agender, literally without gender. Already this work is stumbling into ideas and cultural concepts far beyond the writers’ apparent knowledge as conveyed through moments like, “A few who are born different, throwbacks to when we all had gender,” which enforces a very Western colonialist perspective of social history of gender in ignorance towards the long history of a variety of trans, non-binary and GNC identities including the Mahu, parts of the two-spirit community, the khwaja sira and aravanis, etc., thus demonstrating the dangers of erasure through ahistorical perspective (Chauncey). That line comes from Soren while she’s coming out to Riker about identifying as a woman, explaining that the J’naii previously lived within a gender binary that they naturally evolved past and are now enforcing the experience of gender as a primitive, harmful one, and the expression of it, including through a conventional human version of sexuality, as something to be punished and erased through reparative therapy that parallels conversion therapy experienced by the LGBTQ community on contemporary Earth. Despite the potential resonance of invoking something as horrific as conversion therapy, and Soren’s pain as a minority ostracized for being born different, the episode further undermines itself by casting a cis actress in a hetero relationship with Riker, treating the existence of queerness in any form as purely subtextual and metaphorical. It then also applies a narrative framework not just of their relationship, but of her rebellion against her status quo, but that only functions with some actual subversive quality, instead of cishet rebellion against a gender-nonconforming culture which would in our lived reality be fundamentally unconventional ideas of gender and thus the oppressed, misunderstood culture that the episode is meant to sympathize and identify with.

In the midst of all of this, the episode does manage to fit in some actual effective discussion as long as it keeps it within the framework of particularly Western traditional, binary notions of gender and relations between genders. The ideas analyzed through character dialogue and narrative alike are at least adjacent to if not in direct engagement with “how conceptions of X chromosome structure and function often reflect and support traditional gender stereotypes,” through discussing the social construct of gender, including how women are socialized within and for a romantic context via Riker’s exchanges with Troi, and with emphasis on arbitrary distinctions of gender stereotypes (Richardson 927). However, the episode quickly moves away from these beats towards a conclusion in which Soren is ultimately arrested and she is successfully “treated” by her people. Despite Riker’s efforts to rescue her, she refuses him and now claims that she was ill and mistaken and has been cured, in a tragic and downbeat ending note. These beats further muddle the episode’s themes by committing to the same faulty narrative and thematic trajectory established earlier while discussing how the casting of Soren and of the major J’naii characters generally (all AFAB individuals fitting into an extremely conventional form of androgyny) inherently prevents the intended themes from functioning properly. Soren’s character as is manifests an identity that in our lived reality as viewers does not experience the oppression the story is trying to invoke, rendering her on the surface level as the tragic victim of the oppressive queers, or even framing this conclusion, as perceived by some viewers at the time, a positive presentation of conversion therapy and its effects on her that thusly reinforces the gender binary and the real forces of oppression against the trans community and LGBTQ people as a whole.

In the brief moments where the story and Melinda Culea’s performance halfway converge effectively, I could palpably feel again the pain of self-repression, the fear, and the relief of discovering identity. It was difficult to experience, it hurt me. And that’s an achievement for Star Trek’s writers despite itself and themselves. It was necessary for them to bring out those painful feelings to service the truth of the trans and queer experience as they attempted and largely failed to do. Despite its numerous shortcomings towards the LGBTQ community that I have so clearly demonstrated my extended contemplation of and bitterness towards, they were able to capture those emotions. Despite it possibly not even being entirely intentional given their degree of lack of awareness towards trans history and identity, they evoked strong emotion, and it’s the series’ capacity for powerful, evocative emotion, beneath its writers’ love of an awkward and emotionally cold, seemingly and supposedly utopian world that “necessitates” real-world ideology and oppression largely be buried in layers of often weak metaphor, that keeps me coming back to this franchise. It’s “Perhaps in another lifetime we could have been friends.” It’s “There are FOUR lights!” and just as if not more importantly, Picard’s subsequent confession at the end of that episode, that he almost gave up everything. It’s Sisko’s declaration: “So… I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men. I am an accessory to murder. But the most damning thing of all… I think I can live with it. And if I had to do it all over again – I would. Garak was right about one thing: a guilty conscience is a small price to pay for the safety of the Alpha Quadrant.” It’s the hours and hours of breathless discussion and love brought about between myself and one of my closest friends by his introduction of these series to me. I will not forgive the failures, but I will still work with them, moving into the future with another series on the horizon, and being inspired by the series to work for the future they promise.

Have a good night everybody!