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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I think this episode was really good...if the issue of discrimination was over literally anything other than a social practice of genetic modification. Star Trek's hardline stance on linking social genetic modification to eugenics is one of the things that I've really appreciated, especially as corrosive "thought experiments" about it have sort of entered back into the discourse. I don't think you can practice genetic manipulation on a society wide level without it going very bad very fast. At least I don't think humans can, and the episode doesn't really make a case for why the Illyrians are better at it.
The core message of this episode is so important, especially at this current moment, and the right of people to self determination and to safety and security in their identities and differences is right at the heart of Star Trek, so I'm glad to see SNW continue to affirm it. But...just...there are reasons, real reasons, with lots of horrific history behind them, for why normalizing genetic manipulation in the name of improving or "fixing" populations of people is still a real third rail for me, and I wish the episode had figured out how to engage with that specifically a bit more. This episode does not actually convince me that in the far future utopia of the Federation the dangers of genetic modification as a practice have been addressed, and in absence of that "It used to happen and its bad, but stuff is better now and can't we relax a little" is a bit...hollow
I think you could fix this for me if you made it so that Illyrian genetic modification was something that members of their species voluntarily entered into in adolescence or early adulthood. Make it more of a practice that people voluntarily keep up and less of a program that their society runs and the whole thing works way better for me. That also makes the loose analogy to transgender people in our current time, and really just the right of bodily autonomy and self determination, way more coherent.
To me the vibe was that from the writer's perspective generic modification is so obviously acceptable that it's impossible to even come up with an argument against it that stands up to scrutiny, and that the racism against the genetically modified was just an idiosyncratic cultural trait of the federation that they would hopefully one day grow out of entirely. And I'd pretty much endorse that take. What risk of genocide could possibly be posed by letting parents give their children the modifications they think will serve them well in life? As the episode said, it's not like augments have Khan lurking within them or anything, they're morally no different from anyone else and no more likely to start a genocide.
The danger of letting parents choose modifications they think will serve their children in life is exactly what Bashir expresses in DS9: it gives parents, and society more generally, the power to determine what's acceptably "normal" and flatten out anything that deviates. Geordi similarly expresses at least twice that he doesn't want normal vision, that his blindness is not a defect that needs fixing and what's utopian about the Federation he lives in is that his difference is accommodated and supported.
I've always really appreciated Star Trek's hardline stance on this, because its a moral problem that I feel we've lost a little bit of sight of and is going to emerge again in the next few decades in real life. I think you could make a case for the Ilyrian environmental adaptation being different, but to do that you would have to explicitly place it against the real arguments against gene editing and work through them, and this episode went in a different direction.