11.1.3 See The Light
- Ric Crossman
- 4 minutes ago
- 20 min read
Ghosts Of Illyria
OK, so it’s total nonsense. That doesn’t have to mean it’s nonsensical.
Dropping The Saul
We're not about skewering bad science on this blog; not unless it's going to get us to the real juice. "Ghosts Of Illyria" almost seems designed as a stress test for that approach - viruses spread by light, antibodies spread by punching, people rained on so hard they turn into glowing swirls. Had I a mind to, I'm pretty sure two thousand words complaining how little sense all that makes would be easy enough to write.
But I don't want to. This is clearly Strange New Worlds working in metaphorical mode. Our job is to consider that metaphor, not list the reasons we shouldn't be taking it literally.
And the allegory here, appropriately enough, is very easy to see: light as a catalyst for change. What we see alters who we are; the light hits what lies before us, careens off into our eyes, and we are altered. Our lives are spent as endless victims to the observer effect.
This process, at least in its more extreme forms, has a metaphor of its own: seeing the light. We talk about this, almost invariably, as an unabashed good. We want people to see the light. Revelation implies reinvention: welcome to you, new and improved.
I'm not sure that actually follows, though.
While it's tough to pin down the origin of the phrase (or at least, it was tough for me to pin down), one common theory is that it originally refers to religious conversion, and more specifically, to Saul of Tarsus. The Bible (in Acts of Apostles) describes Saul as a Pharisee and persecutor of early Christians. Whilst travelling along the road to Damascus, he is struck blind by God's radiance. Eventually, he regains his sight and converts to Christianity more or less simultaneously - meaning he both metaphorically and literally sees the light - and becomes Paul the Apostle. Having been a major figure in Acts, Paul himself then becomes author (or co-author, depending on who you talk to) of at least seven and perhaps as many as thirteen books of the New Testament. This includes 2 Corinthians, in which Paul talks about how the world renders men blind, preventing the light of Jesus from entering them (2 Corinthians 4). Some later translations of this passage even use the phrase “see the light”.
It's hardly surprising that the Bible presents this as a triumphant narrative. I'm not even going to argue with that from a historical or theological perspective (Paul's writings contain much of the material homophobic Christians use to justify their bigotry, but the arguments this is based on shonky translations seem reasonable from my own amateur perspective). I'd imagine for Saul's Jewish friends and family, though, his sudden shift in spirituality wasn't quite so well received.
And that's the thing. Revelation always seems good to those undergoing revelation. It may not actually feel good; concluding you’ve been running the wrong operating system for potentially your entire life is liable to be at least disconcerting, even painful. I didn’t particularly revel in my own shift in faith as a teenager, where I passed Paul on the same road in the opposite direction. To the extent that is is good to believe one has become more correct, however, one is better off for the process of revelation.
This needn’t be true, at all, for anyone else. Revelation is a morally neutral proposition in and of itself. For those who see those who've seen the light, the subject may seem better for the process. They way also seem worse, and potentially much worse. I’m sure, for instance, David Mamet thinks it’s a good thing he went from being a fairly bog-standard liberal to being an aggressively stupid conversative, for instance. Others disagree. Certainly, I’d argue Mamet writing an entire book about the importance of his personal crisis of political faith [1] supposes facts not in evidence: to whit, that anyone else should give the slightest sliver of a shit.
With regard to a story about how people respond to seeing the light, and the chaos and even damage that process can result in, this is important to keep in mind. It's not just that the observer can't be sure those undergoing a revelation will become better people, either. It's that they can be rather more sure the revelation is about to be made everybody else's problem.
Heliocentrism
An obvious antecedent to “Ghosts Of Illyria” is Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. In that film (and spoilers ahoy) a team of scientists and astronauts travel to a slowly dying Sun, in the hopes of jump-starting it to full power before Earth freezes completely. Like “Ghosts Of Illyria”, Boyle’s film does not appear overly concerned by rigid scientific accuracy. It’s also a tale in which people find themselves increasingly addicted to light. One character, Searle, becomes ever more obsessed with sitting in as much of the waning Sun’s still terrible brilliance as his eyes can take. His skin flakes ever more badly, and the scorch marks around his sunglasses become ever more obvious. He also spends his time outside his fusion-powered tanning salon jabbering about how he’s found a way to make himself a part of the very Sun itself. When the crew find themselves trapped and needing to leave someone behind, he immediately volunteers, so his new deity can cook him alive while the mission goes on without him.
As odd as that summary makes Searle sound, though, and while his crewmates show basically no interest in his new religion, he clearly finds deep and profound peace in the Sun’s rays. It's also true that the suspicion he was looking for an excuse to sacrifice his life doesn’t change the fact a sacrifice was necessary. His conversion can be seen as broadly positive, then, and only mildly intrusive. Compare this with Pinbacker, another spacefarer who finds religion in the rays of our local star, but who concludes his new God wants to die, and to take the whole of humanity down with them. Pinbacker is an obvious villain, not so much for the conclusions his revelation brought about, but because he claims the moral authority to block the 99.99999999% of humanity who don't want the Sun to go out from getting their wish.
The same process. The same light. But not the same result. The observer effect, by definition, depends on the nature of the observer.
An immediate read of "Ghosts Of Illyria" is that it's about how we can liken light rays to the transmission of information, and then liken that to the spreading of disease. In fact, though, the true focus here is on the individual reaction to seeing the light/gaining the knowledge/contracting the infection. The protons which pass through our protagonists’ pupils no more carry a specific message than a fever dream is written by the flu virus. The metaphor for infection is clearly present, but the nature of that infection stems from the mind of the infected.
The light itself creates nothing, it simply illuminates what was already present.
It also makes the shadows that much darker.
The Una Duality
The two primary revelations of “Ghosts Of Illyria” are what lies inside Dr M’Benga's transporter buffer, and what lies inside Commander Chin-Riley's genome. We can think of these truths as lying in shadow, insofar as it takes the light to reveal them to us. As we’ve seen, though, that isn’t the radiance-related metaphor the episode is exploring. What matters here isn’t what we, as the audience, learn, it’s how our characters themselves respond. The shadow is what passes over La’an’s face when she learns the truth about Una’s true nature.
Once she learns Una’s body doesn’t match the assumptions she has made about it.
I’m far from the first person to note that we can think of Una Chin-Riley's situation as a metaphor for the oppression of trans people. While we’re not going to get into the unpleasant business of judging which women “look” trans, it’s worth noting Romijn herself has played a transgender woman before, in Ugly Betty (she has since noted the role should have gone to an actual trans woman). Let’s just say there are female actors I would be more surprised to learn were trans, and leave it at that.
In any case, more interesting than Chin-Riley being tall or (as we learn here) surprisingly strong, are the roots of anti-Illyrian sentiment, and the ways in which that sentiment finds expression. The central objection to the Illyrian way of life is over their belief that, if your body doesn't match what you need it to be, it’s perfectly reasonable to make non-trivial changes. For the Illyrians, this is about voluntarily adapting themselves to their environment rather than forcibly adapting their environment to them – what in our own parlance we might call choosing Terran forming over terraforming.
The analogy to the trans experience is immediate. It is complicated, perhaps, by the fact that the decision to transition is a person's own, done for unique reasons, which aren't for me to comment upon. It might be safe to say that, broadly, it’s a choice based more on internal factors than environmental ones, but then it’s not like the two exist independently to begin with. Either way, as soon as we reframe the Illyrian approach as changing themselves to make their lives more liveable wherever they are, the parallels cohere into a single straight line - a single ray of light.
This bone-deep need for bone-deep change isn’t always popular, alas. Not just because some people have decided alteration is illegitimate, but because those same people seem convinced doing is a crime against them personally. We might call this the Pinbacker position - I know the truth about what the universe wants, and you cannot be allowed to think differently. The full spread of allowable opinion is viewed through a pinhole. Ultimately, the prejudice against Una isn’t based on who she is, but on who people mistakenly believe she is, and those people being convinced the difference between the two is a problem, and one she should answer for. It wouldn’t be impossible to read this as a metaphor for homophobia as well, perhaps. Ultimately though that fits less well, because Una hasn’t been forced out of the closet, she is refusing to act as though there was ever a closet she was inside [2].
Which, of course, is entirely reasonable. The idea those around you are entitled to full details about the nature of your birth, so that their own assumptions of what that birth looked like can be accurate, is obviously ludicrous; entitled, narcissistic busy-bodying. That's why, with both the Illyrians and trans people, the focus becomes the "deception". It's not who you are, it's the fact you lied about who you are. La'An essentially says this directly to Una. This is incorrect, obviously. Una hasn't lied, she has declined to reveal a truth no-one has any business asking of her. The problem is that society demands that truth be known anyway. The system is set up to demand disclosure, and then to punish those who do not disclose, while also punishing those who do disclose, just in a different way. Number One risks not just the end of her career if she is honest about herself, Noonien-Singh physically attacks her when she learns the truth. It's damned if you do, damned if you don't, with far too many insisting the biggest problem is how the people being damned aren't making the process easy enough for everyone else.
Home TERF
Let's linger on La'An for a little while, because there's a lot to say about how the episode uses her as a stand-in for both transphobes as people, and transphobia as a concept.
The first thing to note here is that the episode works very hard to contextualise La'An's attitudes without letting her entirely off the hook. To her credit, she refuses to take the easy way out and blame her reaction entirely upon the light-virus. That said, it's not like she could have convincingly done otherwise. In a nice sleight of hand, the episode has La'An casually demeaning the entire Illyrian way of life in front of Una, assuming she's safe in doing so because Una is so obviously not "one of them". We might even go so far as to note that this is the origin story of more than one famous transphobe - carelessly giving offence to trans people, and then dedicating themselves to the oppression and immiseration of the people they offended, rather than simply apologising and opening themselves to growth. La'An doesn't quite commit to the latter as the episode ends, but she clearly steps back from the former. "Ghosts..." thereby reminds us that what makes a good person isn't a lack of blindspots, it's how they respond when one of those spots is pointed out.
It perhaps helps that we can understand what led our Lieutenant to where she ended up. We do not need to defend her prejudice against Illyrians - and note that Chapel and (especially) M’Benga are very clear that anti-Illyrian feeling is prejudice – to recognise how much of it is internalised self-hatred. After an entire lifetime of being linked to the Augments responsible for millions of deaths, after being told over and over that the augmented DNA she carried within her made her not just a threat, but a monster, we might ask ourselves what other result we might reasonably expect.
This leads us to the women who push transmisogyny under the guise of "feminism", a strange, sad and above all cruel practice. At its heart is a paradox - the hatred of trans women because they're women, instilled by a patriarchal society we are all hurt by in our own ways, combined with a denial of trans women as women, because the scars born of that hurt cluster differently across a trans woman's back.
La'An's reaction stems from simultaneously hating Una the way she hates herself, while also being furious that Una never had to live through the abuse she did as someone with augmented DNA. This latter aspect links directly to the nonsense concept of “male socialisation”, the wretched idea that trans women cannot have been hurt by the patriarchy before coming out, because up until then, the rulers of that same patriarchy mistook them for one of their own. We can pull this apart quite easily, of course – among other things, it would immediately imply lesbians aren’t hurt by homophobia while still in the closet, which these self-professed defenders of gay women seem oddly reluctant to argue. Just within the context of the episode, the foolishness of the argument is made clear - La'An not knowing Una is Illyrian clearly makes no difference to how Una feels in hearing her heritage being insulted.
La’An has both been damaged by, and yet perpetuates, her society’s ingrained power differentials. This leads us toward the question of what those differentials are.
The Two Roberts
At this point, things get a little complicated. As we’ve touched upon already, the Federation-wide ban on genetic augmentation stems from the period in Earth’s history when a selective breeding programme [3] resulted in dozens of self-proclaimed “supermen” seizing power across the globe, ultimately leading to a planet-wide conflict killing a non-trivial proportion of the entire human race. We’ll consider in a moment whether banning genetic augmentation is a sensible or meaningful approach to preventing anything similar from happening again, but it’s inarguable the situation the law ostensibly exists to prevent is both possible, and horrifying.
It is, to put it mildly, difficult to make the same argument about the potential consequences of not reversing the extent to which trans women are allowed to exist in society.
I mean, even just the phrasing proves the point. “Not reversing”. The entirety of the anti-trans movement in the US, and the UK, is based on the assumption that catastrophe will befall any society which treats trans women the same way as it does cis women, despite the inescapable fact that we’d been doing that for years, entirely calamity-free.
Despite this obvious and crucial difference, though, we can still find our way to a parallel. Una argues here that the Illyrian approach to genetic alteration is qualitatively different to the Augment programme on Earth. As we've covered, the Illyrian goal is to adapt to their environment, as an alternative to forcing their environment to adapt to them. The script intends this as a bright line separating the Chin-Rileys from the Noonien-Singhs, and insofar as they represent very different attitudes to how to interact with the (strange new) world one finds oneself in, that makes some sense. The thing is, though, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch at all to suggest Khan and co.’s desire to dominate was itself them adapting to the environment they were born into. It relieves the Augments of not one ounce of responsibility for the atrocities they committed, to recognise the attitudes and circumstances of the western world of the 1990s [4] will have paid a key role in making them believe not just that they deserved to be tyrants, but that tyrants were what the planet needed. This was always the unanswered question raised by the idea the Augments superior intelligence led to superior ambition – why was that ambition specifically to become a dictator? Why wasn’t it something like, to pick an example very much not at random, to become the best doctor they possibly could?
All this is to say that banning augmentation isn't just not the only way to prevent another round of Eugenics Wars, it may not even be the best way. An alternative approach would simply be to improve society somewhat, bringing it to a place where an augmented human simply wouldn’t want to take over. We could build a world where it simply wouldn’t occur to anyone that that world could benefit from being conquered.
Whether humanity has reached that point in the 23rd, or even 24th century, is an interesting proposition – both TNG and DS9 have episodes which suggest the answer is “no”. That’s not really what I’m interested in exploring here, though. My point right now is that the augment ban is there not because augmentation itself is morally wrong, but because it makes exploiting a cultural fault-line – the desire to seize power, or to follow those who seek to seize power – unusually easy.
It's here we get back to the transphobes. Over the last few years, anti-trans organisations and individuals have tried multiple arguments as to why trans women shouldn’t be allowed in women’s toilets. Until various despicable decisions made by craven politicians and incompetent judges, they gained little ground outside their own fever swamps, in no small part because their arguments generally require people to not know how bathrooms work. The one exception to this has been claims that male sexual predators might find being able to pretend to be a trans woman a convenient way to enter the ladies' as a prelude to assaulting someone inside.
This is ultimately no less facile than any of the other ramblings dribbling out of the Mumsnet morass. It assumes that men can’t disguise themselves as cis women, or for that matter as cleaners, both of which are obviously untrue. More importantly, though, it assumes the social convention that men won’t enter women’s spaces (which is all we’ve ever really been talking about here) is going to dissuade someone already planning to commit a serious crime.
What I’m getting at here isn’t how stupid the argument is, though. Rather, my focus is on how it's built atop a genuine problem with our culture – men are taught they have the right to a woman’s body, irrespective of that woman’s opinion on the matter. Where the transphobe argument breaks down is the idea that the consequences of that genuine problem mean we must focus on making rare or even non-existent edge-cases of the problem fractionally less likely, rather than actually working to end the problem itself.
This isn't even ignoring the elephant in the room, it's feeding it - suggesting the very societal issue that needs to be destroyed is in some sense immutable. You can’t change what men are like, all you can do is limit the ways in which they will try to do what men will always want to do. It tells us men cannot be better, and in doing so, makes it easier for men to be worse.
The counter to this is, admittedly, fairly immediate. It's going to take time to thoroughly destroy rape culture, and we want to continue to find ways to limit the damage it causes before we can behead the beast and burn its bones. In itself, this is fairly hard to argue with (though the fact the anti-trans movement keeps making common cause with actual rapists seems worth mentioning at this point). Even then, though, we can effortless consider approaches which wouldn’t require a blanket ban on a specific class of people. A legal requirement for single-occupancy toilets would prevent the scenarios the transphobes insist are what keep them up at night, for instance. An equivalently swift fix on paper for the Augment issue would be to actually enforce the laws that exist to prevent the co-option of democracy.
But these are difficult asks politically, mostly because they'd require effort and/or money from people who matter. Just telling a comparatively tiny group of people they’re barred from doing something anyone else can is just so much easier.
This is something which, a million years ago and on another blog, I named the “Senator Kelly Problem”, after the X-Men antagonist who proposed legislation requiring all mutants be placed on a government register. Kelly’s justification here (at least in part, and at least in the X-Men film – I forget the specifics in the comics) was that, if we ban guns from schools, we also need to ban mutant children whose powers are at least as dangerous as a gun. A genuine concern is identified - we don't want school children taking weapons into their classes - but is then treated as a consideration serious enough that civil liberties have to be violated, but not serious enough that any other action except those violations need to be taken. Yes, "what if a kid brings a gun to school?" is a scenario society actually needs to spend time on, whereas "what if a man fakes transition to try and attack women in toilets" quite simply isn't. But the Kellys and Galbraiths of this world do share the critical quality of insisting the only realistic way to solve the problem they obsess over just so happens to be punishing an entire class of people who are already scapegoated and victimised, and without the political power to fight back against what these belligerent Bobs insist simply has to be done to them.
Weather The Storm
Eagle-eyed readers - or at this point, just those with uncommonly long memories - will have noted the fact that this essay constitutes two broadly distinct strands. We've got the uncertain benefits of revelation, and we've got the entirely certain downsides of listening to the "gender critical". How do we combine the two?
The answer is in what has been called "Trans Derangement Syndrome" - the terrifying speed with which someone can go from never really considering trans women at all, to suddenly and wholly dedicating themselves to their oppression. The light they're exposed to delivers them from effective ignorance, but prompts instead absolute, seething disgust. The hatred is all but all-consuming, too; trans allies talk about supporting trans people, transphobes talk about almost nothing else [5]. The conversion is no less sudden, no less thorough, than that of Saul of Tarsus; it is also no less spiritual. Exiling trans people from society becomes a holy quest, a crusade no less wrong-headed and no less damaging than every other crusade that precedes it.
We return again to Lieutenant Noonien-Singh. "Ghosts Of Illyria" does an extremely good job of exploring the sudden change from unawareness to frothing rage through La'An. I mean this partially in the sense that both La'An's own trauma and her own infection by the light virus provide enough justification for her sudden explosion of bigotry - it's crucial the episode leaves us believing the two women can continue to work together after their brawl in Engineering, and I think the script (and Chong and Romijin) pull this off. But it's also successful in the sense of capturing that instantaneous change - that light-switch flick - from people's starting point in life being a non-topic to being all one cares about.
And what allows for this to happen are the parts within those seeing the light which don't change - the features of their mental landscape which remain wholly unilluminated. Switching from the existence of trans women being an irrelevance to a crisis is only possible when your view to the importance of trans women's own experiences doesn't alter at all.
Again, the episode uses La'An's own interiority as a way of contextualising her response, but it should be noted that this is what plenty of transphobes do, too. When I first learned of the bathroom battles (as part of my job), I spent some time reading up on what was being argued about. What became clear almost immediately was trans people were desperate to not have their positions and experience be ignored, while the anti-trans movement were desperate to have all positions and experiences be ignored other than their own. The Pinbacker Principle emanating from thousands of pinholes, all trying to converge on trans life, to set it on fire and burn it to the ground.
Part of this speaks to the narcissism which runs through the gender critical movement like a self-satisfied tapeworm. One of the reasons it's so hard to get across the fact that trans inclusion has been very much the norm for decades in many cases [6] is that TDS sufferers simply can't recognise that the relationship between cis women and trans women in society and the law actually existed and was discussed before they themselves became aware of it. You might as well explain to a baby that their rattle continues to exist when you put it in a drawer as convince your average TERF that trans people exist outside of their contemptuous glare.
I want to though to be explicit in recognising that, as with La'An, there are those who speak from a place of trauma. Men are extremely accomplished at inflicting pain and damage upon on women, including occasionally within what was supposed to be a woman's space, It is neither the pain nor the problem I contest, but the "solution". It is insisting that trauma, real and horrifying and unimaginable to me as it is, becomes less likely for making thousands of wholly innocent people's lives made worse because of a biological similarity to those actually guilty, in the certain knowledge that other much more plausibly successful and less cruel approaches exist.
Which is where we land with Una and La'An too. Una clearly isn't reminiscent of humanity's Augments beyond the broadest biological similarity. She comes from a society which clearly doesn't resemble Khan's Earth. She has played precisely zero role in the damage done to La'An. At the absolute most, she may have generated the Chief of Security some additional paperwork. Anything else is La'An deciding the scale of her own problem is enough to justify making it someone else's, despite the cost to them that will involve. And we see that cost here, as Pike notes on the surface of Hetemit IX. The Illyrians there were so desperate to be part of a society which reflexively feared them, they all but lost themselves entirely, becoming nothing but ghosts inside the storm which consumed them.
That is the fate the "gender critical" movement desire for trans people - to exist only as ghosts, rarely-glimpsed shadows on the margins. Pale imitations of who they were, and who they truly wanted to be. Such is the vision of their post-revelation world: a society where every light they do not wish to see is snuffed out. An army of penny-ante Pinbackers, whose claims to seek extinguishment through "sensitive challenging" and reheated conversion therapy can't change the fundamental truth that what they serve and seek is darkness.
"Ghosts Of Illyria" is clear-eyed about where it stands. Those demanding DNA is destiny are wrong. Those insisting the innocent be punished for sharing qualities with the guilty are wrong. And not just because of what the people some want excluded are capable of becoming. Yes, Pike and Spock were saved by the former colonists. Yes, Una is the only reason the Enterprise wasn't destroyed. But as she notes in her own log, while she's touched by Pike defending her as the best officer in the fleet, that shouldn't be the reason he's prepared to defend her.
It doesn't matter how brightly Una's light burns, or how much Pike relies on that light to guide him.
It should simply be enough that she is an Illyrian, and every Illyrian, like every trans woman, deserves their time in the sun.
[1] This example brought to you by one of Christopher Hitchens finest and least objectionable moments, in which he tore Mamet’s post-conversion book on politics to scorched shreds, noting it had been “written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason”. I’d link to the review, but the New York Times has put it behind a paywall, and these days, to support the NYT is to support supporting fascism.
[2] Another alternative metaphor would be for Una being white-passing. I think this is less useful a reading, though. While it would obviously be utterly outrageous to suggest racism is dead in America, I do think an episode released in 2022 that’s talking about certain kinds of people being actively barred from specific spaces, with the full and explicit support of the system at large, has a much more direct parallel to transphobia than racism.
[3] Later retconned into a programme of genetic alteration, presumably when someone noted how foolish it was to suggest you could arrive at the ubermensch in just two generations via sufficiently discerning fucking.
[4] For all the ways this show has been slammed for not doing enough to honour Trek’s progressive history, the reveal that Khan was raised in the US is low-key savage.
[5] They do have a tendency to dip into Islamophobia, broader anti-queerness, and - occasionally and confusingly - defending men who marry their stepdaughters if they've made a couple of good movies.
[6] The Women's Institute had been trans inclusive since the 70s, for instance, though they reversed that policy while I was writing this essay, presumably from a fear of legal action.
Episode Ordering
1. A Man Alone 2. Dream Catcher
5. Ghosts Of Illyria 6. Context Is For Kings
10. Time And Again
11. Code Of Honor