The Moment Disability Ceases to Exist in Star Trek, Is the Moment It Becomes Dystopian
Embracing different abilities is just one more flavor of IDIC
Star Trek YouTuber Steve Shives got me thinking — as he usually does — with a video he posted about whether disability should exist at all in stories of science fiction and fantasy.
Shives was commenting on a social media post by someone who argued that disabilities just should never exist in at least most science fiction and fantasy.
I won’t rehash his content; you can watch it for yourself here:
And while I very much agree with what he says in the video, Shives admits that he’s commenting from the perspective of a typically abled person.
So, as a disabled person myself, I thought that I might share a few of my own thoughts.
Much of the crux of the post Shives criticizes in the video seems to be that highly advanced technology and/or magic should do away entirely in the worlds and universes of science fiction and fantasy, like that of Star Trek.
Except that just culling out disability from the human species sounds an awfully lot like eugenics. And we know from Star Trek that eugenics is BAD.
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Disability has always existed in Star Trek.
Star Trek: The Next Generation’s sight-impaired Geordi LaForge (Levar Burton) was the epitome of disability representation in the franchise for decades.
But disability in Star Trek has always been more than this one character.
It goes back to the very beginning, with the crippled Captain Christopher Pike (Sean Kenney).
And what began in the original series as a storytelling device to reintroduce Pike in the absence of the original actor, Jeffrey Hunter, would later become an existential story about Pike (Anson Mount) and the fate Which he foresees in Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
But beyond a potentially compelling story hook, disability exists in Star Trek — and sci-fi, more broadly — because disability always has existed in reality.
Yes, certainly, there are ailments and conditions that we’ve done away with, due to technology.
And, yet, we manufacture new ways to be disabled, such as car accidents.
Shives points out that the ableist clown — his term, although I tend to agree — said that they believe that “[n]o one wants to be disabled.”
He’s right that that’s an incredibly sweeping statement, and it’s wrong as well.
Take deaf folks, for example:
Because their deafness allows them to be a member of this supportive community, many Deaf people report that they do not want the ability to hear. According to the [National Association of the Deaf], “Deaf people like being Deaf, want to be Deaf, and are proud of their Deafness”.
And this is a topic that I’ve contemplated a lot over the years, living with my various disabilities.
Certainly, part of me sees very clearly that my life would have been so much easier had I not been disabled.
However, I also strongly believe that it’s everything I have lived through that makes me the woman I am today, and has brought me to this very specific moment I'm my life.
Without my disability, would I have been the same basically happy person that I am today?
Probably not, really.
And that’s where I think that Star Trek gets disability right.
Part of what makes it so Utopian is that it accepts disability and disabled people for who and what they are.
It’s just another flavor of the long-held Star Trek philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, or IDIC.
After all, if we were to erase disability, how far would that go?
What about Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s (Patrick Stewart) baldness?
In our time we have this huge hair-replacement industry.
But consider what creator Gene Roddenberry had to say back when a reporter commented on the character’s hair loss, saying, “Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness.”
And responded “No, by the 24th century, no one will care.”
The Great Bird of the Galaxy could well have been talking about any manner of disabilities or conditions.
That’s what makes Star Trek special.
The day it gives that up, it ceases to be a Utopia and turns on its head to become darkly and depressingly dystopian.
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