Things I Stole From Dr Julian Bashir
It’s probably not a huge shocker to most people that I grew up on Star Trek. Just because my own writing has been more down to Earth doesn’t mean I don’t owe a lot to that venerable staple of science fiction.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9, in particular, was a watershed moment in teen Lee’s understanding of narrative, theme, and the power of science fiction.
But as much as I could wax rhapsodic on the joys of this series, the biggest legacy it’s left in my life comes from where it fell short.
Spoilers for an episode of tv that aired in 1997 follow.
My favorite character on the show was Dr Julian Bashir. He was brilliant, awkward, earnest, idealistic, pretty, and as gay as you could be on daytime cable in 1993. Which wasn’t very gay, but it meant a lot to me.
For the first several season, they didn’t do much with Julian. He was the but of many jokes, but also the voice of naive idealism that seemed like a comment on where earlier Star Trek iterations had abstracted or obscured hard truths. He was charming for his good intentions and his conviction, but his characterization was fairly shallow.
Then, in the way of long running series, they got several seasons in, and decided to backfill some history for him.
In his new backstory, audiences discovered Julian was “slow” and “falling behind” as a child. His parents, wracked with anxiety for his future, decided to have him secretly and illegally genetically altered.
At the time, I thought it was unrealistic that apparently well intentioned parents would put their own child through invasive, untested, experimental treatment to assuage their own anxiety about him not being what they’d hoped for. Now, I think it’s the least fictional thing about the show.
I loved this backstory. Particularly, I loved that Julian himself expressed a sense of trauma and betrayal at his parents interventions. And it wasn’t just because this was a huge liability to his career if it was ever discovered. It was because he felt that his parents had killed their son, in order to have a successful son that could serve as a “legacy” to make up for his father’s own failures.
Again, surprising no-one, I loved this backstory. I loved the ground level, familial discussion of genetic modification.
I tuned in week after week, season after season, breathlessly waiting for the show to do something with it.
But very little came of it.
There were a few episodes where Julian's fellow modified individuals turned up, and Julian would be forced to confront his past a little bit. These were unsatisfying. These featured other genetically modified characters who were clearly meant to display genetic engineering gone “wrong”. They were caricatures of neurodivergence, that nobody liked and that the narrative mocked. The characters were eventually redeemed by medical intervention or by it turning out that their weirdness could be helpful to others.
I don’t think we ever see Julian speaking to his parents again, despite the somewhat too-pat ending of that first episode, when Julian’s father agrees to two years in a minimum security prison in order to atone for Julian’s alteration, and prevent any harm to Julian’s career, and Julian promises to visit him. We don’t see any more of the trauma he expressed so clearly.
It was all so disappointing, and twenty six years later, it still bugs me.
There was so much potential here! His selfconciousness at being different and his utter reliance on being brilliant to charm others were both so much more interesting against the backdrop of his having been robbed of some fundamental part of himself in the past, because he’d been different in the wrong way.
When I realized I could bring these experiences into my own books, I was instantly excited. I could explore the experiences that had been left hanging in Julian’s arc.
And, of course, I could make it explicitly queer.
Names in Their Blood (the second book in the Second Sentinels series) starts to really lean into these ideas, and these themes. That’s going to continue to develop throughout the series.
But of course I wanted to follow in the grand tradition of science fiction that’s exploring futures that are about the social and technological issues of today.
And I know which children’s bodies and minds are the battlegrounds of public opinion and scientific inquiry today. I know which children inspire such panic in parents, journalists and teachers that almost nothing about them escapes scrutiny and intervention.
Autistic kids and trans kids (two groups with very, very notable overlap often used by detractors to undermine each other) were the obvious analogs to Julian today.
There are so many parents in this country who delay or refuse vaccines for a host of potentially deadly or debilitating disorder out of fear of having autistic kids. The fact that there is no connection between vaccines and Autism does nothing to assuage their terror.
There are so many parents terrified of their kids being trans that they want to erase all other trans kids from existence. They would rather normalize strangers inspecting their children’s genitals than allow their kids to be around trans kids who might “contaminate” them with transness.
These are the kids that huge swaths of the US want to “fix”. Particularly, these are the kids who are pushed into interventions that cause severe trauma, who generally don’t want to be changed on some fundamental level. They only want to be allowed to live as they are.
In my therapy practice, I work with a lot of neurodivgent and neurodiverse people. That’s because I work with a lot of trans and nonbinary people, and, again, those groups overlap massively. I have watched up close the trauma people experience, day after day, year after year, consistent messaging that they are fundamentally wrong. That they are a worse case scenario made flesh. That things that bring you joy are proof of your freakishness and perverseness, and that things that upset you are silly and invalid and fake. All your emotions and thoughts are wrong.
So, I am writing a character inspired by Dr. Julian Bashir, and by the people who are, today, being told that every corner of their psyche needs outside intervention in order to be acceptable.
Because the story of genetic modification being bad because it might make the wrong people powerful has never been of interest to me. Those are stories about people’s bodies and minds as seen from the outside. I am far more interested in the inside story.
Before I close, I want to offer a resource to anyone wanting to learn more about how trans and autistic people are made to experience the things I’ve written above. I have finally, after years of searching, found a book about coping with autism that is for autistic adults. Non autistic people can also benefit from it immensely, but importantly, it is a book that is not for parents or teachers looking to control autistic children. It is for self-determining individuals, and for people who want to help autistic people do that.
The book was still put in the “Parenting” section of my local Barns & Noble, which I am peeved about, and which continues to underscore that the conversation around autism has been dominated by autistic people being discussed, not included.
It’s called “Unmaksing Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity” and while I’m still reading my copy, I am enjoying it immensely and know I will be loaning it out all over.
Also, I am once again participating in a newsletter exchange where you can get free books and stories if you want to sign up for other author’s newsletters! It goes live Feb 1st, and the link is here.
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.