Star Trek: Discovery's third season to introduce franchise's first transgender, non-binary characters
Aux Features TV
CBS All Access announced on Wednesday that its upcoming third season of Star Trek: Discovery will be the first to introduce transgender and non-binary characters into the long-running franchise.
Non-binary performer Blu del Barrio will board the U.S.S. Discovery as Adira, a character that develops “unexpected” bonds with Lt. Commander Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz). Joining them is transgender actor Ian Alexander, an alum of Netflix’s The OA and Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part II. He’ll portray Gray, who’s described as “empathetic, warm and eager to fulfill his lifelong dream of being a Trill host.”
“Star Trek has always made a mission of giving visibility to underrepresented communities because it believes in showing people that a future without division on the basis of race, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation is entirely within our reach,” Michelle Paradise, co-showrunner and executive producer, said in a statement. “We take pride in working closely with Blu del Barrio, Ian Alexander and Nick Adams at GLAAD to create the extraordinary characters of Adira and Gray, and bring their stories to life with empathy, understanding, empowerment and joy.”
Discovery’s third season arrives amidst a flurry of Star Trek-related activity, from Picard and Lower Decks to that Michelle Yeoh spinoff to the recently announced Strange New Worlds. It debuts on Thursday, October 15, with new episodes airing weekly.
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Wasn’t Soren (from the TNG episode “The Outcast”) nonbinary?
I guess they mean regular characters.
“Regular”!? Stop hatin!
It’s kind of a weird area due to how Deep Space Nine completely changed the entire nature of how the Trill worked, so now whatever was intended by that ending is totally up in the air.
Soren wasn’t a Trill, they were J’naii. (Although maybe I don’t understand what you mean)
I had the same thought upon first reading this. The J’naii had “one gender” that was androgynous so that is fairly close to non-binary although they understandably didn’t get into too much of the physiology.
That was my first thought.
I’m pretty sure there was also a non-binary “third” gender in an episode of Enterprise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogenitor), but I concede that is probably better left forgotten.
Soren was not actually nonbinary, as she identified as female, but she came from a society where nonbinary was the norm.
Yeah, I thought she was ostracized because she identified as a gender— so I guess they could technically be classified as non-binary, and then transgender, and then I think by the end of the episode she was forced to be non-binary? I forget the plot of it.My pronouns are very confusing here due to the shifting nature of the character.
We watched that episode a few weeks ago (we’re watching through the whole series with our kids). The J’naii identify as nonbinary, and anyone who identifies as a specific gender is at first ostracized and then eventually charged with a crime and sent away for “reeducation.” Soren acts “normal” at first and then eventually reveals that they identify as female, although the show doesn’t get into the nitty gritty (e.g. what pronouns they want to use, they don’t change gender expression, etc.). At the end, Soren comes back from “reeducation” and says (somewhat unconvincingly) that they realize it was all a mistake and that they’re happier and better now. Riker is pissed off but the Enterprise has to leave at that point.Notably, they don’t address the fact that Riker and Worf beam down to the planet, unauthorized, and assault a couple of guards in an effort to “rescue” Soren, who says they don’t want to be rescued. Riker’s all dejected but they depart without Soren. Picard evidently never finds out about Riker’s antics, since there’s no scene of him yelling at Riker for violating regulations (and, potentially, the Prime Directive).
Ah yes, I remember now, thanks!I’m not a huge fan of the prime directive anyways— “we’re ultimately a benevolent galactic coalition of planets that could help non-warp worlds immensely, but if they’re going to devour themselves in genocidal warfare and immeasurable suffering, who are we to show them there’s a better way?”It’s like watching a group of people savagely beat a person for taking the last slice of pizza while you walk past with a surplus of pizzas you’re not even going to eat and saying “eh, they’ll figure it out.” Or watching an animal trapped under a fallen branch struggle to get out and just meandering along after shrugging and thinking “sucks to be you, mister bunny!”
Well, the justification they give in the show is that they had tried intervening in such cases in the past, and it usually didn’t make anything better and in fact often made things worse. And on a narrative level, it’s essentially a plot device for creating ethical dilemmas.
I know it’s just a plot device, but I still think it’s morally unethical for them to not intervene, and I think a lot of the times they do in the show it leads to positive outcomes. Hell, humans finally stopped fighting after Vulcans made first contact in Star Trek canon and ushered in the golden age (or whatever). Sure, they did it because we had developed warp capabilities, but the result would’ve been the same if they landed and said “hey, check out these warp drives.”
Well, of course it leads to positive outcomes when they do it on the show; we don’t want to watch the protagonists routinely fucking things up. As for whether it’s unethical to not intervene, well, I’m content to take the shows’ word for it that intervening in other cultures’ development has usually turned out as bad or worse than not intervening.Sure, the Vulcans could have showed up a week earlier, but then they also could have showed up a week earlier than that, and a week earlier than that… you have to draw the line somewhere, and “the civilization has developed warp capabilities” is a reasonable line for letting them know that, hey, there’s other cultures out here.
To be fair to the Prime Directive, we have a fabulously shitty track-record of “improving” less-advanced cultures on our own planet.
Though it does get kind of absurd when it extends to ignoring the utter eradication of the species/culture. “Nope, can’t prevent that natural catastrophe that’s going to make the planet surface uninhabitable, we don’t want to corrupt the natural progression of the species from “alive” to “dead”.
I think it was originally a conscious decision to avoid becoming merry colonisers in space, going around solving the problems of the savages. One minute you’re dropping off some replicators on a backward planet, then you have to install the infrastructure to support them, then you have to have human staff on the ground to maintain the infrastructure, then you have to have a local bureaucracy in place to oversee the maintenance. Then it turns out you have a colonial capital on their planet and suddenly you’re an empire.
The funny thing about that episode is that at the time it aired it would have been understood to be a metaphor for gay people instead of non-binary/ trans people. Now it’s difficult to read it as anything other than a trans metaphor.
Fun fact! Jonathan Frakes thought the character should have been more male-oriented:
Jonathan Frakes, who played Riker, complained later that the episode
wasn’t “gutsy” enough and that “Soren should have been more evidently
male.”
Jonathan Frakes is on record as saying the episode would have been much stronger if Soren was played by a male actor
Techncially Soren identified as female.The majority of her species was non-binary, though.
Yeah. Strictly speaking, there were a lot of non-binary characters in that episode, even if we discount Soren. And there have been plenty of other times Trek has tackled unusual gender situations. If they had said “these are the first Trek lead characters to be non-binary/trans” that would be something, but every story I’ve seen just says “first ever!!”
Are they going to join the generic, nameless, bridge crew who’s jobs are all to spout a little techno-babble every now and then and be utterly interchangeable unless they need to generate some unearned emotion by finally giving one a backstory so they can be killed off in the same episode?
Duh.
I get the complaint, but I’ve felt that having the bridge officers in the background on Discovery is actually an improvement. After Voyager and Enterprise—which had more main characters than the writers cared about or knew how to develop—I thought having a smaller main and larger secondary cast would better serve future Trek shows.Airiam’s sudden character buildup and death could’ve been better handled, though I give them something of a pass since that was filmed right after a sudden change in showrunners.
I’d like to think that this is about representation and not some way to generate publicity to help prop up what has been a pretty disappointing show.
LOL! The SJW trash that is STD continues to burn. Is the he/she going to be Mary Sued like Michelle Burhman? Or be a disrespectful insubordinate know it all cunt like Mariner?
New Frontier (granted, a book series, not a TV show) had a hermaphrodite-style alien, although I don’t know if that technically counts as non-binary.
Good on them. I don’t know if their execution of these characters will amount to more than tokenism, because I know nothing about Discovery, and a lot of similar gestures in pop culture end up as mere stunts. But I certainly hope they get it right here.
I do know, however, that a lot of supposed fans of Star Trek are about to be extremely upset that a series that has been uniformly progressive on issues of race, gender, creed and diversity is continuing that trend.
On the contrary, I think they’ll probably be more annoyed that things that have already existed in Star Trek lore are being “tokenized” (and quiet frankly, exploited) for a ratings bump. On the bright side, at least they’re casting properly
Yes, they should continue not featuring trans and non-binary characters in order to avoid exploiting them.
tamato, tamato
Nonhuman species with fluid or nonbinary genders have been done, sure. But sometimes it’s more powerful to make the subtext the text.
But yeah, I’m sure some fans will be mad about that, too.
Sure, being binary gets a bad rap, but they had to steal the Enterprise or that emp was going to knock out their planet’s computer!
That this news comes out the same time as the reports of Boyega’s complaints about SW are surfacing is some kind of weird coincidence. Like Star Wars, Discovery gets a lot of press for casting outside of the regular box but like Star Wars, they’re not doing an awful lot with these characters. They’re just ticking boxes.
Well in the 23rd century, the Enterprise’s core was almost certainly a quantum computerSo you could say that character was also non-binary!
it’s a little misleading because Star Trek hasn’t shied away from portraying alien cultures with different genders, gender roles, and gender expressions.The Enterprise episode “Cogenitor” portrays an alien culture with three distinct biological sexes, all of which play a role in reproduction. And I don’t remember the episode well, but it doesn’t focus on “whoa how weird: THREE sexes??” but instead on the fact that the male and female members of this race oppress the third-sexed members.Trill, whether intended or not, are an allegory for transgendered people.There are probably other examples, and it’s not that Star Trek has been perfect, but what Discovery is actually introducing here are humans/Terrans who are trans and non-binary. What I find more cool is the casting of actors with those identities.
“There are probably other examples, and it’s not that Star Trek has been perfect, but what Discovery is actually introducing here are humans/Terrans who are trans and non-binary. What I find more cool is the casting of actors with those identities.”
This does actually matter, though. For the same reason the original series is more progressive for portraying the “first” interracial kiss on television between actual humans than the fact that Kirk was clearly hooking up with green ladies. Sometimes, you have to stop hiding behind metaphors and aliens and just do that shit.
“Sometimes, you have to stop hiding behind metaphors and aliens and just do that shit.”
This is fair. Literal representation matters in ways that allegorical representation doesn’t. And often Star Trek would use its alien races as moral teaching tools, sometimes more than as actual characters. So I hope these new characters are able to just exist as trans and non-binary without their genders being their primary character trait. The press release just smacked to me as a little dismissive/ignorant of Star Trek’s (pretty good for network tv) history in representation: this isn’t the first time non-cis gender identity has been explored on Star Trek.
Sure, but given how everyone freaked out when the first press releases came out with info on Discovery (that it would have a Sonequa Martin-Green and Michelle Yeoh at the helm rather than white men, which turned out to only be partially true) I think it’s fair of them to remind people what Trek is all about while they make the announcement. I don’t usually like talk about “real fans” vs “fake fans,” but when it comes to Trek, if you have a racist/sexist/homophobic/otherwise hateful response when it comes to the identity of the cast and characters you are not a real fan of the show.
I’d have to think the Trill symbionts were totally intended to be nonbinary, given that that was kind of the point of the original TNG episode in which they appeared (Beverly falls in love with a Trill whose host gets mortally injured, but doesn’t want to continue the relationship after the symbiont is transplanted into a female body, despite both Trill and host being DTF),
Trill are interesting because there’s no direct analogue (obviously) to human gender identities, and that flexibility has allowed for multiple groups of people to identify with them!I think they tend to be perceived more often as trans or gender fluid rather than non-binary because they do identify with specific genders: as far as we’ve seen, when the Trill host is male, the Trill identifies as male; when the host is female, the Trill identifies as female. It’s just that their gender identity changes with their host.They’re pansexual, too, which makes sense.
Trill are more analogous to religious concepts of reincarnation. The soul has no specific gender; that’s a totally physical thing.
Hmm, I don’t know about intended, though I imagine the Trill could develop that way in their stories. I think the older stories are pretty embedded in binary gender thinking and rather pointed more toward being more open about sexual orientation. The symbionts are asexual, the hosts have a gender.
The reason I think the symbionts are nonbinary is because they’re gender-fluid—they seem to adapt to their host’s gender identification, without preference, across hosts. They certainly aren’t asexual, however—as shown in the TNG episode, when the symbiont of her love interest is transferred to a new host, they’re ready to get together with Beverly immediately. The Trill are constantly hooking up in Star Trek and the symbionts seem to be willing participants in, if not instigators of, those sexual desires.
Im sure the people who made careers on YouTube bashing Discovery will love this news….
Great, now hire some competent writers.
I say this all the time, but I would like to see more characters who are not in the chain of command. You know, “free”?
This season they’re off in the distant future or whatever, so I would assume we’ll see at least some non-starfleet characters.But on the other, a lone ship lost far from home is how we got Neelix.
“This season they’re off in the distant future or whatever…”That right there sets my expectations very, very low.
“it’s a beautiful panoply utopia…where everybody can be ordered to kill by anyone else”
Seems like they want to have their cake and eat it by removing the show from the pre-TOS era continuity that has essentially plagued it since day one, but also continuing to be about the Federation and retread existing territory. Honestly I don’t know why they didn’t just send them to a future relatively soon after the events of the TNG era, which would have been more in line with what most of the fanbase seem to want explored. It would be a cheap move but more agreeable than what they’ve done.
Every time I think about the show I remember season 2, where they spent episode after episode after episode building up what seemed to be origin of the borg.
And lets be clear: a borg origin story would have been a terrible idea. It makes no sense. It makes a mess of Q Who (much more than the enterprise episode did). It would have been just about the last possible story that they should ever have tried to tell.But what’s worse than that? A bunch of writers who are so hacky that they write something that looks exactly like a borg origin, except that it isn’t, and they didn’t even realize that they were doing it.I need to admit to myself that season 3 is almost certainly going to be a hate-watch.
It was real bad. The series had a lot of potential but seems to throw away any good will constantly. Wasting Jason Isaacs and Michelle Yeoh, both of whom had the potential to be excellent captains, taking a cast of really good actors and giving them largely unlikable and underused characters. A continuity breaking setting just so the writers can lazily exploit existing characters and events from the original show. Seriously even if the show wouldn’t necessarily be good, having it set post-Voyager would at least avoid a bunch of the issues regarding redesigns and additional technology that doesn’t fit in in the era it’s set. There are so many niggles its also easy to forget how monumentally stupid it is to have the main character be Spock’s secret sister, who was never mentioned over 40 years of tv and movies.
The non-binary makes sense but in the utopian future would you even be trans, or would there be a perfect procedure that just makes you the exact presentation you want to be?Maybe I’m not making sense. Like you’d always “pass” and you wouldn’t even need the trans identity. You’d literally perfectly be the gender you want. Now I sound dumb. Ignore me.
Nah I was thinking the same thing. With this level of technological advancement, I feel like the concept of transgender would be different centuries from now.
Read the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. The setting is a post-scarcity utopia that’s a bit like Star Trek, only much higher-tech, and the author actually thought out the implications of what that technology would do to society. Characters regularly transition between genders; sometimes a couple will have two children so both members can experience being the father and the mother.
It’s an odd thing (and bear in mind that I’m as cis and male as they come so my opinion shouldn’t have any political weight here) that the issue was so off the radar up until now that you could almost headcanon that the 90s Star Treks (TOS had too many gender politics issues) took place in a world that had genuinely got past it all. There was only ever a handful of characters whose childhood you ever knew very much about, and you only really saw anyone over a five year period. For all you knew, half of them could have transitioned years ago like it wasn’t a thing, or have it booked in after the misson/war/journey back from the Delta quadrant was over. Formally baking that into the narrative feels like it would be a more radical narrative step than mapping current values on to what’s supposed to be a more advanced culture.
Also, picking a Trill as the character? Surely anyone who’s given the matter a moment’s thought couldn’t possibly imagine that a species whose biology includes regular body swaps even has the same sort of words and concepts to talk about gender presentation as we do. If this character is presenting to the rest of the crew as ‘non-binary’ that’s surely because the Universal Translator is trying to find some best-Federationese equivalent for a Trill word that carries no more weight in terms of how they think of themselves than their shoe size.
the first to introduce transgender and non-binary characters into the long-running franchise.