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As most of my subscribers are, no doubt, aware, I am a Star Trek fan. One of Star Trek’s most popular authors is Peter David. Let me emphasize, these are authors I’m talking about, not screenwriters. One finds their work in print, not on the screen.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, two of the main characters are Commander Riker and Counselor Troi, who apparently had a romance before TNG’s pilot episode. In one of the novels for which Peter David is famous, called Imzadi, he delves into this tumultuous romance.
Now just to explain, Counselor Troi is half Betazoid, meaning that her home planet is Betazed, and "Imzadi," is a Betazoid word which doesn’t translate precisely. Apparently, "Imzadi" is a sort of pet name one applies to the first person with whom one reached a certain level of intimacy that entails a telepathic component; the first person with whom this level of intimacy was both physical and mental.
It has to do with Riker being assigned to Betazed as a lieutenant where one of his first official duties entails attending a Betazoid wedding.
I have a number of subscribers whom, I know, are fans enough themselves to begin deriving a little amusement at the idea already. You see, at Betazoid weddings, it’s the custom for the bride, the groom, and all the assembled company to be nude.
Apparently, Riker doesn’t know about this in advance, and so is caught a little off guard when, suddenly, everyone around him starts stripping down, but not one for modesty, and not shy, as soon as this custom is explained to him he decides to join in. He steps out of the room long enough to find a place to store his uniform, then returns to his seat, and a Betazoid woman on her way past pauses to contemplate him and says, "You human men are certain hairy. Why is that?"
Without missing a beat, Riker says, "Traction."
That’s what Peter David’s writing is like. Well apparently, after a few years, Peter David got tired of playing in the sandboxes of existing Star Trek series and decided to start one of his own. This is a series found in the novels only. It’s called Star Trek: New Frontier. Its events revolve around the Starship Excalibur and a number of characters Peter David created himself, but also a number found elsewhere in Star Trek though mainly as secondary characters who have only appeared once or twice, whom, evidently, Peter David found interesting enough to bring in and make main characters. This includes Commander Elizabeth Shelby and Dr. Selar.
The Excalibur is assigned to patrol sector 221-G, the territory of the late Thallonian Empire, the collapse of which has left a power vacuum. Their mission is basically just to prevent any given conflicts from becoming violent and possibly escalating into all-out war. Apparently, Starfleet thought one ship would be enough for that.
The Captain is a fellow named McKenzie Calhoun, whose actual name I’m not sure how to pronounce, but this is its spelling: Mk’n’zy. He’s from a planet called Xenex whose population he previously organized in a successful revolution against another race that had occupied the planet. In negotiating the final truce after their withdrawal, they appealed to the Federation to arbitrate and that’s how McKenzie met Picard.
After the arbitration is complete, Picard asks McKenzie what's next for him, and when he doesn’t know, Picard recommends service in Starfleet.
His first day at the Academy, an upper classman tries to have a little fun at his expense and makes the mistake of starting in on his father. He then regains consciousness three hours later in the medical bay with a broken jaw and McKenzie earns himself the nickname "One-Punch Calhoun" which follows him all the way to graduation.
Calhoun turns out to be a bit of a cowboy. He’s very reminiscent of Jim Kirk. The author here seems to be very good at finding at least one opportunity in every book for him to lay someone out with one punch. In one book, it takes two, and then Calhoun complains about getting old. Yes, he is very reminiscent of Kirk, yet monogamous. In book after book, he only has eyes for Shelby. Only three times has the notion surfaced of him being intimate with anyone else. One of these times was before he met her, another was when he had been out of contact with her for months and she thought he was dead, and the third seems to have been in a book in the series I have yet to come across.
Calhoun is the only Xenexian to have ever served in Starfleet, and apparently, since this makes him something of an outsider, he prefers to compose his entire crew of outsiders; that is of people who are a little out of the ordinary, and subsequently, don't normally fit in, anywhere, except together.
One good example is his chief of security, a fellow named Zak Kebron, who is the only Brikar to have served in Starfleet. Kebron is a towering hulk of a figure who has a knack for being mistaken for a rock formation if he stands the right way. It’s funny, because over and over, Kebron is introduced into the story from someone else’s perspective.
"Shelby came around the corner and bumped into a mountain range. She looked up... and up."
Apparently, in Starfleet Academy, Kebron was roommates with Worf who introduced him to the hardboiled detective novel. Worf hated it just because, by his assessment, the detective’s approach as well as the approach of each person he dealt with wasn’t warrior-like enough.
But apparently, Kebron loved it, and one reason was that, in his words, "...the detective always had all the subtlety of a hurricane in a feather factory."
Another outsider in the crew is Soleta, who was apparently conceived in an act of nonconsensual sexual contact between a Vulcan mother and a Romulan father. She basically has to make her way through every book with this grim spectre hanging over everything she does, grappling with her own highly conflicted heritage the whole way.
There's also Dr. Selar, whom we met in an episode of TNG. She is characterized by an aversion to intimacy which is high by even Vulcan standards, and apparently, this is because she was married once, and she and her husband, in the act of mating, also bonded telepathically, both being Vulcan, of course, and while they were like that, the husband had a heart attack. She realized it and started trying to disentangle herself so she could do something about it, but apparently, this takes a moment, and by the time she was done, he was gone. As a Vulcan, Selar tries to be detached, but as a doctor, she blames herself, since afterall, if she could have come out of the meld a little faster, she probably could have saved him.
But the reason I’m bringing all this up is the approach Peter David takes to the difficulty of gender-neutral pronouns with one particular character; the Chief Engineer and later First Officer, a Hermat named Burgoyne 172.
As I recall, it was a fourth season episode of TNG which introduced us to a race with no gender, in which every single person is neither male nor female. The Hermats, on the other hand, are both. Every single one of them has both male and female organs, internally as well as externally.
It was funny, because for a while, it appeared that the doctor, Selar, was pregnant by Burgoyne, while Burgoyne was pregnant by the helmsman, a human named McHenry. That was how it seemed. It turned out not to be so, but that was how it appeared.
The Hermats, being both male and female encounter pronoun difficulties whenever they make contact with another race, because usually, that race has two distinctly different genders, and sometimes more. So one of the most urgent orders of business when this happens is for a team of Hermat linguists to sit down with a team of linguists from the other race and hash out in all that race’s most common languages a group of non-gender-specific pronouns.
In English, instead of "he" or "she," it’s "s/he." Instead of "him" or "her," it’s "hir." Instead of "himself" or "herself," it’s "hirself."
Clever, I think, but awkward. Peter David, while a very skilled author, is not much of a linguist. How come we in the English-speaking world can’t just rid ourselves of this manner of difficulty in establishing gender-neutral pronouns? How hard can it be for someone with the right expertise?
It’s fair, unless speaking of a particular person, to say "he or she," "him or her," etc. It is fair, but incredibly monotonous. That is one sort of pronoun trouble we run into here.
This is not going to seem immediately related to this, but bear with me. I find the company of transgendered people uncomfortable. It’s not fair, and I recognize that, and I offer my apologies for whatever they are worth, but I think, in my case anyway, most of the discomfort stems from pronoun difficulty. Clarity, utility and accuracy are very important to me. I don’t like language that is vague or ambiguous, because although it can be quite emotional, it doesn’t actually provide anything for reason to work with and scrutinize. A preference for it when clear language is available is dishonest.
A common objection I have to political discourse is that, all too often, the person in question talks up a storm without actually saying anything. I don’t like discourse that describes two distinctly different groups of people (homosexuals and child molesters, Muslims and terrorists) or two distinctly different acts (defending the religious liberties of Muslims and paving the way for Sharia Law) as if they are the same. Clear, useful, meaningful, accurate language strikes me as honest and so I have an aversion to situations in which such is not an option. That’s the other sort of trouble we run into here.
But it doesn’t make sense to me for something like this to remain such a consistent problem, given the fact that any given language is always undergoing change. Why can’t we just develop gender-neutral pronouns? Why can’t we come up with one word that means either "he" or "she," either "him" or "her," etc? Why can’t we just bring a team of linguists together to figure this out? First and second person pronouns as well as plural are not gender specific; at least not in English. Why do third person, singular pronouns have to be?
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