That episode is good but I have mixed feelings on it. I still don’t really understand the moral it wants to present. On one hand, it does explore gender and what it entails to get ostracized for not conforming to social gender norms. On the other hand, the normally pro-justice Enterprise crew (except for Worf and Riker) allow a literal gender conversion therapy to occur because that’s what this alien race does in its culture. That part never sat with me well. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the aliens in question come from a society that has abolished gender entirely. Any gender expression is regarded as mental illness at best and anti-social criminality at worst. Riker falls in love with an alien who wants to express feminine traits, then becomes a renegade, and is then given some kind of psychological treatment to “fix” their gender non-conformance.
The alien Riker falls in love with has their brain scrambled, tells Riker they were sick and have now been cured. Most of the Enterprise crew just shrugs at this, says these aliens simply do things different.
It never sat with me because A) it’s expressing queer identity in reverse. As in, what if there were a society where being non-binary is normal and being cis-het is weird. The show could have just been more on the nose about this, because it makes the non-binary aliens come across as dominating, inflexible, and cruel. They could have just explicitly made an episode about normal queer issues.
B) the “it’s just their culture” never sat with me well either, since aliens in star trek are usually meant to represent human social issues. These aliens clearly represent human issues regarding gender, and yet the Enterprise doesn’t take the correct moral stance except for two of them.
Anyone else feel weird about this episode? I still like it, it’s just odd.
It’s definitely Not Good, but a lot of that comes from the time it was written and the producers being completely against anything queer. At one point Roddenberry wanted gay background extras in a single scene in an episode where Picard goes to Risa, and even that was vetoed by the producers.
I’d like to hope a modern redo of the episode would be handled more tactfully, but given it was the early 90s, any mainstream gender identity stuff would’ve been wild to see on TV, bad as it is today.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the aliens in question come from a society that has abolished gender entirely. Any gender expression is regarded as mental illness at best and anti-social criminality at worst.
If they’ve abolished gender, how do they distinguish between gendered and non gendered ways of expressing themselves?
It’s mentioned their species previously had male/female gender distinction, but no longer does, both physically and what’s socially acceptable to express. They’re also aware of other alien species who have gender distinction.
The main issue in the story is a character from the alien species is having a romance with a human in a very gendered way, so that’s what ends up being criminal. Other people have mentioned, but this story was probably supposed to be an allegory about homosexuality rather than gender itself.
