Question above. My only experience is with a handful of episodes from the original series. They were OK, but I'm not sure I want to watch the whole thing. It's a little too low budget for me. Can I just jump into the movies or one of the later series?
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Maybe you were too young to pick up on it at the time, but they laid it down pretty thick.
In her intro you didn't notice Bashir wanting to have sex with her then Sisko alluding to him not knowing she was previously a man? "wolf whistle this is going to take some getting used to". This gender confusion is a recurring theme.
Man undergoes surgery then is in the body of a women, taking on a new female name with calling her the old male name literally deadnaming. Oh my mistake, "past lifing". "Reincarnation surgery", yeah that's the ticket. kek.
At least in the TNG they had it right: Dr Beverly falls in love with the trill, he gets put into Riker temporarily and Crusher has offscreen sex with him, then he changes into a woman and Beverly is disgusted.
Kind of hard to miss, but I guess it wasn't on people's radar back in the 90s.
You ever notice that when somebody uses a supernatural being to refer to trannies, they call them demons or skinwalkers?
You're right to recognize TNG's Trill as a tranny allegory, whether or not it was intentional. That one was a body-snatching monster. It wore people like a skinsuit, and discarded them when it was done. It was unable to understand why actual humans were repulsed by it.
That's closer to what a tranny is. They're not just "somebody who once lived as the opposite sex." If that's all it was, you wouldn't find them nearly as disturbing. There's something more to them than that. They're more of a suicidal self-rejection. They cope with it by inventing a new identity, rejecting the old one completely, to the point where they mutilate their own bodies and erase their past self.
That's why they say "Mike was always Michelle, she just didn't know it yet," not "Mike became Michelle." That's why they kill themselves once the delusion breaks. That self-hatred, and the body-snatching by the delusional identity, believing itself to be the "true" identity, is what transgenderism actually is.
DS9's Trill are the complete opposite of TNG's Trill, so they're a rejection of what transgenderism actually is. DS9's Trill don't erase the previous life. The current life doesn't become a previous one either. There's never a moment where Jadzia says "Actually, Kurzon was always Jadzia." Kurzon was a whole person who lived a full life. Jadzia was a whole person (though "full life", maybe not). Dax is a non-sapient mechanism to scientifically justify past lives.
In order for trannies to be represented by DS9's Trill, they'd have to accept that their previous selves were complete and worthwhile people, which they can't do. It would require they face themselves. Most of them can't even do that in a literal sense; they get agitated by mirrors. If they were capable of that, they wouldn't be trannies in the first place. It's acceptance, not denial. They're complete opposites.
And you might say that it's supposed to be transgender allegory, if not a very good one, but they're so far removed from each other that I just don't see it. I find it far more likely that the Trill were just meant to be a sci-fi take on reincarnation, and trend-chasing parasites (Ira Steven Behr) latched onto it twenty years later.