Fellas, are numerals transphobic? (Bonus: identifying as your own gender is transphobic)
Fellas, are numerals transphobic? (Bonus: identifying as your own gender is transphobic)
Link as per rules: https://startrek.website/comment/2196171
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I want to actually look at this idea that it's offensive to trans people to hold up a nonconsensual example of transition up as an ideal, and to look at it within a safe space for trans people. First, let's note that every cisgender-identifying person I know was coerced into identifying that way. Most of them turned out to agree with the identity forced upon them. So, that is the baseline we are dealing with when it comes to gender rights. Everyone gets coerced into some ideal. If Starfleet didn't force gender onto children, they would have a fair criticism of the borg with regard to gender. But we saw Miles and Keiko O'Brien raise their daughter Molly, and Molly was pressured to be a daughter from the moment of her birth. In the place of the narrative, the Borg are a vilain. They explore the question, "what if the federation didn't care about consent". We've got to have villains like that in fiction, they're great. So, given the necessity of a villain, do we want yet another binary gender villain, or something more interesting and diverse? And yeah, the villain doesn't treat gender with respect. That's okay, they're a villain. Expecting every trans person in fiction to be raised cisgender and to break out of their programming on their own is... weird. You're cutting off a lot of stories there just to make trans people suffer and protect this cisnormative ideal of how being trans should work. This is science fiction, there should be alien races who are alien. There should be unfamiliar scenarios. And sometimes unfamiliar science fiction scenarios about villains are the only representation swarmgender not-people like me can get. And it is better than nothing.
First, let's note that every cisgender-identifying person I know was coerced into identifying that way. Most of them turned out to agree with the identity forced upon them. So, that is the baseline we are dealing with when it comes to gender rights. Everyone gets coerced into some ideal.
Yeah and that ideal is exclusively that of a doctor looking at your baby genitals and putting you in one of two gendered boxes where you are supposed to remain for the rest of your life. Being coerced into transitioning like the borg does not mirror that experience, it mirrors clericofascist groomer narratives about transness being forced on children. It will always be grating as a metaphor to a large number of trans people for that reason. That does not mean it can't work as a metaphor for you when there's other parts of the borg collective that resonate with you, i know i've drawn a ton of inspiration from cyberpunk narratives about body modification, i've also taken enough acid to understand the boundless being-at-home that comes with being part of a superorganism even though that's nothing i can identify with in sober life. But other trans people will see at least some of the borg narrative from a different, unworkable angle than you and many will struggle more violently with that idea than me because they've, for example, had to deal with a transphobic environment that has accused them of being groomed and insisted that they're not transitioning out of their own free will. They would probably resonate more with the idea that Seven was able to leave the normative, expression-denying environment of the borg cube and has adopted the Voyager crew as found family. Transfems in particular may find more semblance to their own experience in the act of removing alien body parts to look more like a woman. They may recognize the feeling of finally being yourself, of finally having a rich interior life and emotions that had been denied from them for decades.
But all of that is moot because 7/9 didn't choose to become a woman. Parts of its body were rotting and sloughing off as they were rejected, and Janeway said "Tough nuts, you're a woman now". That is the body horror experienced by transmascs. 7/9 never expressed consent, only acceptance that it was the only possible option for survival. Janeway never asked permission, and with 7/9 being forced to become human, everybody implictly accepted that meant 7/9 had to become a woman because humans aren't nonbinary. That entire angle of the plot dehumanises nonbinary people, not to mention that 7/9 is pressured to pursue men as it becomes a woman because all must bow to the heteropatriarchy.
If trans women see themselves in a being that was forced against its will to become a woman then that is also horrible, and the difference between myself and them is that they have options. Even within Star Trek, trans women have Jadzia Dax and Soren. They have people of their gender with a similar experience and journey. And for the journey of being forced into womanhood under threat of violence we have Seven of Nine. And that is not a transfem experience, that is a transmasc/nonbinary/intersex experience such as I had.
If you're correct to say that the transfem reading of Seven of Nine resonates with the desire not to be accused of having been forced into transitioning, then how does the fact that 7/9 was forced into transitioning make any sense? No, 7/9 is the story of forced transition, forced womanhood. The abuses suffered by intersex infants and nonbinary adults. 7/9's story is the clericofascist groomer narrative if 7/9 is transfem. But if 7/9 is nonbinary, then its story is the actual oppression of sex and gender nonbinary people.