The Outcast

There was an episode of Star Trek TNG (The Next Generation) called The Outcast which I thought did a pretty good job of addressing the kind of situation many gay people find themselves in. The gist is that a species of humanoids called the J'naii have all evolved 'beyond' gender. There are no males or females but all persons are both. There are sometimes exceptions, people born who actually consider themselves one or the other and feel attracted to a male or a female. These are the social outcasts, the ones who have a 'sickness'. Luckily, there is something called psychotectic treatment which is quite effective at removing all traces of the 'perversion' from the afflicted person and they are made normal, just like everyone else.

An individual called Soren, who thinks of herself as female, falls in love with Commander Riker, and the feeling is mutual. She tells him how people like her must meet in secrecy, in fear of being discovered, in fear of being made to undergo the psychotectic treatment. Before a tribunal, she makes a very good, passionate appeal to them that she and others like her are no different at all from anyone else; they love, laugh, play, work, live life just like everyone else with the one exception of preferring to be and mate with one gender rather than the 'norm' of being both.

Upon learning that Soren will be forced to undergo the treatment she so fears, Riker becomes so outraged that he is determined to rescue her, even to bring her onto the Enterprise for asylum, if necessary. But he is too late. He and Worf find her on the planet and he is trying to rescue her, but she has no desire at all to be 'rescued'. She remembers what happened between her and Riker, how she used to think and feel, but after having the treatment, she is now normal, like all the other J'naii. She is embarrassed and ashamed at having acted in such a way, and when Riker tells her, "I love you", she can only reply, "I'm sorry".

This is one of the few times I know of in fiction where they got it right about the treatment and results of it. Typically, there is always "some part" of the person they were before, imprisoned within the body, feeling horrible, etc. The truth is that when we develop the ability to program brains, this is how it will be. If you are one way, you may fear and loathe any idea of changing you, but once you ARE changed, it will be just as though you never were the other way, as far as your personality and desires are concerned.

We humans have a ways to go yet before we get to that stage...but we ARE getting there. At the moment, the cutting edge of such neurological science is being able to reconstruct, by reading brain activity, which video clip the subject has just seen. Some call it brain movies. If you look at the actual video clip versus the clip constructed from reading the brain activity, you see there is a great deal lost in the translation. It's hardly an HD reproduction. Then again, this science is very much in it's infancy. You couldn't see or hear very much, or very well, on televisions either when they still brand new things.

My point here, that I really hope at least some can understand, is that eventually, even if probably not in our lifetime, humans WILL have such technology. It will be commonplace in court for the accused to be subjected to such brain scans to extract information about where they were and what they were doing, what they heard, saw, said, felt, at the time of the alleged crime. Further, it will be entirely possible to program the human brain just as easily as a programmer might currently program an inorganic computer. It's all in knowing how.

TRB