When Is A Vulcan Not A Vulcan?
This season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been hit or miss if you go by Bluesky, where I’ve mostly been enjoying it more than the general consensus, although I do think there have been maybe one too many episodes evoking, or invoking, something from The Original Series. What I want to address here, though, is “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans”, which the Bluesky consensus seemed to hold as facially transphobic.
I’m going to try to tread carefully here, both because it wasn’t difficult for me to see why this perspective existed, and because of today’s sociopolitical climate where trans people are under a relentless, hateful, and wrong-headed assault.
Nonetheless, I believe that a close reading of the text not only does not support the idea that “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” is transphobic but in fact makes an overt pro-trans statement, even if it’s implicitly overt rather than explicitly so.
Here’s how the argument that the episode is transphobic goes, roughly speaking: four crew members transform into Vulcans (in order to complete a mission) and when the reversal doesn’t work they proceed to enjoy being what they’ve become and resist being told by the other members of the crew that they are wrong and don’t understand or remember who they truly are inside.
You can see it, right? So can I—but here’s how the actual text of the story, I think, refutes the charge.
My posit is this: the crew members in their original forms can be taken to represent trans people who know who they are and are comfortable in their own skins. The transformation into Vulcanhood in fact takes them away from their true selves; in this reading they are forced to be cis. When their friends are trying to convince them to return to what they were before, that’s predicated upon the knowledge that deep down these four crew members know this is not who they are.
It’s not that I don’t get why people see it the other way: the crew members’ original selves are taken to be read as analogous to a cisgender default, and therefore the transformation to Vulcanhood taken to be read as medical transition to transgender. In the world of Star Trek, however, wherein people are encouraged to explore and become who they really are inside and out, why would we necessarily read the original selves to be a cisgender default?
(I mean, other than the fact that the show depicts them all as cisgender straight people, but that’s a whole other thing.)
Instead, we can read them as representing the breadth of human experience already fulfilling their true selves (and therefore analogous to a world in which transness is part of that), and the switch to Vulcanhood then becomes an aberrant rejection of those true selves. In essence, the switch to Vulcanhood is the real detransition.
When people in our current reality try to convince trans people that they are wrong, that this isn’t who they really are, we know that it is these abusive accusers who are the ones who are wrong. In the future, fictional reality of Star Trek, when their friends are trying to convince the Vulcanized that this isn’t who they really are, we know that it is these caring, compassion friends who are the ones who are right.
Those are two fundamentally opposed sets of actions and events and interactions.
When the friends of these four crew members urge and convince them to undergo a process whereby Spock can show them their katras, reminding them of who they truly are, this is the opposite of trying to convince trans people to detransition, even though what’s happening in the episode is literally a detransition. They are being reminded of the fact that they already are whole and fulfilled people who have been allowed to pursue their individuality and personhood in any ways they have chosen. That is analogously equivalent to celebrating a world in which trans people are allowed to be trans.
The fact that plot mechanically what’s happening is a medical transition and then detransition understandably can land as problematic, and I’ll fully admit that perhaps that specific plot widget should have made them rethink or abandon the episode. That said, I don’t think the episode when examined closely upholds the argument that it’s transphobic at its core.
If I can indulge in something of a sidebar, the episode also received a fair share of criticism for being biologically essentialist (a known risk for Star Trek), but I don’t think a close reading of the text fully supports this, either.
To my mind, everything these four crew members experience is Vulcanhood as passed through their own, pre-existing personalities. Pike ignorantly blows it when he asks if Vulcans are monsters, because if anything what the episode showed is that these four humans were kind of monsters while they were Vulcans. Those four were every bit as informed by their own personalities as they were by the Vulcanization process.
The episode itself has a whole other Vulcan who is so obsessed with humanity that he’s got a human name and, in a post-credits tag, relentlessly quizzes Spock on bizarre aspects of human culture. He’s basically nothing like the kinds of Vulcans these four Enterprise crew members became (certainly he’s no monster), and so the biological essentialism critique at least somewhat sort of just unravels.
As to my main argument here, I don’t especially expect any of this to convince anyone who found the episode of be transphobic otherwise, and I do think that “the plot uses medical transition and detransition” is something I don’t have the right to tell anyone not to glom onto as a problem.
In the end, though I do submit that a closer look at what the story actually does in its premise and execution renders it an argument in favor of remaining true to who you are, and does that in the context a world where “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” is a known philosophical goal and belief. That, to me, can be read as a fictional, future reality sending a message that, here in our actual, present reality, necessarily includes the support of trans people.
If anything, the fault here perhaps is in Star Trek not being willing to make an express, explicit defense of transness rather than an implicit, even if I think technically overt, one. If you’re afraid to say what needs to be the loud part out loud, you risk creating a muddle where a miracle could have been.