Star Trek Meta - Blog Posts

fastdrawfarmboy

8 months ago

I think it hits extra hard if he was trans to begin with and Jules was already his chosen name. Because imagine being forced to have your chosen name essentially become your second dead name not because you chose another but because someone, your parents who you trusted, took it from you and killed it.

personally i do think julian bashir is trans, but not in a way that sublimates his genetic alterations into a trans allegory. i think he's disabled and trans at the same time, but i think his rebellion against his parents--the symbolic death of his old self with the name change--that's not about gender, for him, at all.

it's about the incredible violation of autonomy he experienced as a disabled person under the knife of a eugenicist society. it's about the need to reclaim some, any, of the agency that was so completely stolen from him by his parents.

it's about discovering that his entire self was deconstructed and reconstructed, without his knowledge or consent, for the express purpose of being less of a burden on his parents.

because let's not forget that the death of julian's old self was not his decision. it was his parents who killed the old self and created a new one.

let's not forget that human society in star trek is still recovering from the eugenics wars--that just because it's post-scarcity doesn't mean it's a utopia.

let's not forget the multiple episodes where bashir is forced to confront the fact that his "success story" is truthfully a gross reminder of how deeply his society (and his family) hates disabled people, not only shown in how they tried to fix him, but also in the fact that the process so rarely works as intended, yet is still done anyway--and the failures and the ones too far gone to save are locked away! with no connection to general society, and only the bare minimum provision for their physical needs, with no privacy and no autonomy!

and let's not forget that julian sees these people and is torn between the empathy he has for them, and his urge to fix them. and he goes through with this urge on Sarina, "fixing" her to conform to his idea of what she ought to be, treating her as a problem to be solved, objectifying her via "my ideal woman was trapped in this disabled body/mind and i saved her," thus continuing the cycle of violence, because even he can't conceive of a world where the disabled do not need to be fixed. where the violence done to him was wrong. fuck man