Find and Replace, the entire internet, "neurodiverse" --> "neurodivergent"

In which I am an alien (or possibly a robot)

I’ve always loved Star Trek, because it’s a show that deliberately portrays people like me.

It’s only recently that I’ve sort of started to process that even though I see representation in it, that representation is literally alienating. People like me in Star Trek are aliens - and occasionally robots or computer programs.

In Star Trek, if we use wheelchairs it’s because we come from a planet with less gravity than Earth. Humans haven’t needed wheelchairs for a long time, because all the disabilities are healed away by technology. [Deep Space Nine, S02E06: Melora]

Same gender relationships happen as a technicality, when two people who were of different genders in a previous symbiotic life want to get back together again. If they do declare their love for each other they’re exiled, because leaving your past lives in the past is more important than anything else - meaning that the society that treats a symbiont’s life as sacred and never-ending condemns that symbiont to death rather than permit and celebrate the relationship. [Deep Space Nine, S04E06: Rejoined]

Bisexuality is shown very overtly, but as part of the standard queer baddie trope - Kira’s “evil twin” in the mirror universe is openly bisexual but as part of that promiscuous hedonism vibe that only bad guys get to have. [Deep Space Nine, S03E19: Through the Looking Glass]

An entire race is trained from birth into alexithymia.

There’s a race that speaks entirely in metaphor, whose language is obscure and difficult to understand even though the universal translators are working, which reminds me both of my own autistic echolalia and of my aphasiac friends. Meaning is connected to abstract stories and the emotions they evoke in the speaker. [The Next Generation, S05E02: Darmok]

Autistic people are humans but they’re also ex-robots, robbed of their neurotypical childhood and struggling to reintegrate into society, with robotic parts that can never be removed.

Or they are actually just robots.

Or they’re sentient goo, working hard to maintain the appearance of humanity, with questionable success, and forced to shamefully liquify into their natural form in private every 16 hours. (If they don’t do that, they literally melt.)

If they have only the good bits of autism, they’re brilliant but genetically engineered and forced to hide it.

Hyperempathic people are aliens who look human, which is something, I guess?

People with addictions are murderous lizard people, designed to be literally enslaved by their addiction.

Trans people are a combination of symbiont and host, with the gender of the host being more dominant and therefore the gender changing with the host body. [Deep Space Nine, S03E25: Facets]

Men who give birth are accepted and celebrated - and they bring new life into the world via a hatchling pond. [Deep Space Nine, S03E14: Heart of Stone]

Nonbinary people are so nonbinary that they’re not even allowed to have a gender, and trans characters who do have a gender are deviant and put on trial. [The Next Generation, S05E17: The Outcast]

Non-monogamy can be the healthy norm... in an alien species. [Enterprise, S02E14: Stigma]

But non-monogamy sometimes happens in societies with... questionable power structures. [Deep Space Nine, S02E10: Sanctuary]

Or if they look like humans, they’re alien societies that we would consider childlike or hedonistic. [The Next Generation, S01E08: Justice]

And then there’s the usual mental illness tropes involving delusions, multiple personalities, etc... Which always have a suitably sci-fi explanation that is easily resolved. [The Next Generation, S06E21: Frame of Mind]

Those are kind of only partly the subject of this post, because they are often temporary, exaggerated, and clinically inaccurate. They’re also not a part of the person’s identity or a characteristic of their species. I feel like I should nod to it because those episodes, like everything else in this post, are minority-as-entertainment for average viewers.

Similarly there are occasionally humans who acquire disabilities, like Pike’s paralysis; or characters whose impairments are not a characteristic of their species, like Deanna’s temporary loss of empathic ability; or characters whose sensory impairments are normal for them but are not generally disabling, like Geordi’s blindness.

There are a lot of minority representations I’ve missed, just because I don’t relate to them and so they don’t stick in my mind so much.

It’s a tricky issue because on the one hand, many main characters who’re humanoid are aliens - so statistically a lot of the minority groups you’d expect to see are going to be aliens. But... every human is straight, binary and cis (as far as we know), mentally healthy, neurotypical... and all the captains are human, most of them are white, most of them are men, all of them have only been seen with partners of a different binary gender...

The respected, powerful people we’re meant to relate to and see as role models are not like us. They are the characters working to accept us. Our inclusion in the show relies on their benevolence.

Star Trek is a fiction of human archetypes that are healed and integrated. The Ferengi are our greed and sexism; over time we see Quark learning to value family and ethics over latinum, and we see Ferengi culture giving their women equal rights. The Klingons are our prideful rage; we see Worf and B’Elanna accepting and valuing their Klingon nature alongside their place in a human-centric Federation society, even when Klingons are officially at war with the Federation [Deep Space Nine, S04E01-2: The Way of the Warrior]. Occasionally we see a character change so much that they have to accept their new self and move on and distance themself from the Federation, like Jhet’leya of the Kobali - but for the most part Star Trek is about people learning to value their own quirks and others’ differences too, and becoming closer as a result.

It does this from the point of view of humans being the standard relatable model, and gender/sexuality/relationship/neurotype/ability minorities being the aliens and outsiders that the viewers are taught to relate to. The writers helped straight viewers to accept and understand same-gender attraction with Dax and Kahn, and showed us how to treat Elaysians in wheelchairs without being condescending - but the way those episodes were written, it was clear that the audience were assumed to be able-bodied and not-queer. They’re plots that make minority people, different people, relatable to “normal” people. It reminds me of a survey I once took part in, which invited anyone over the age of 18 to participate, and then asked in one question, “do you know any trans people?” The people writing the survey knew that trans people existed, but were behaving as though we existed on some other plane and couldn’t possibly be filling out this survey. It was accidentally aimed at cis people, because trans people were so far away as to be almost hypothetical, so much so that the survey was “open to all” - because trans people are not “all”.

We are people with strange face markings and strange skin colours and strange facial features and circuits for brains. Often we’re not the bad guys (unless we’re queer), but we’re oddities for the main characters to find fascinating or spectacular. We are the monster/alien of the week - who will the Federation befriend this time? Sometimes we’re even lizard people or we’re a lifeform that the human characters never do understand. Their characters are part of integration stories, where a rift between the archetype of the audience (the relatable human and nearly-human main characters) and the minority archetype is healed.

How does that feel, to only be able to relate to an alien species that shares one characteristic with you? How does it feel if, like me, you have so many overlapping minority characteristics that not even the alien races can fully reflect you?

I don’t want to sound too negative about this. I’m very aware that Star Trek is generally very progressive. Dax and Kahn’s kiss was a huge step for mainstream TV, for example. I am excited to see how future Star Trek shows and movies bring us into that comfort zone. I guess, though, that the nature of the show is that we will always be alien. Or... maybe there’s a morally good human character I’ve missed somewhere in amongst the huge back catalogue who’s queer, non-monogamous, or incidentally neurodiverse...?*

* Does gay-married Sulu count?

Tactile-emotional synaesthesia

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