10 Times Star Trek: The Next Generation Went Woke

"They're not gentlemen, or ladies, Commander. They're a unified pair," says Commander Quinteros to Commander Riker about the Bynars in the opening scenes of 11001001. For television of the late 1980s, that's quite the progressive critique of gendered assumptions! If we delve further, however, we find that the episode is even more radical. We would argue that, in it, the Bynars come to represent both the Western gender binary and its deconstruction.

Within 'Bynar,' as given by writers Maurice Hurley and Robert Lewin, is the performative 'I pronounce you Bynar-y,' after the machine code that is the opposition of two possible states (1 or 0). Each Bynar of the "unified pair" is the symmetrical reflection of the other — both physically and in code (One-Zero, Zero-One, for example). 

Commander Riker (mis)reads this binary computer code as binary gender — the either/or of male/female, masculine/feminine — but, as we learnt from Commander Quinteros, the thing that makes them appear to be binary gendered is their binary (Bynar-y) code, but in reality, it is the very thing that makes them non-binary. The Bynars hold up a mirror to our pre-programmed expectations on gender to decompile them.

(Nonetheless, despite being told from the outset, Riker does continue to misgender the Bynars when they are showing him the new holodeck set-up.)

Moving ahead to the next season for Q Who, when Captain Picard goes down to engineering to meet the Borg drone that's just transported in, the titular Q reappears over his shoulder to say, "Interesting, isn't it? Not a he, not a she. Not like anything you've ever seen." Like Q, this statement could be interpreted in several different ways. It could be retrospectively argued that transposing the non-binary onto the 'otherness' of the Borg replicates the age-old homophobic trope that 'queers are coming to convert you.'