yeah uh i don't think most of us want our gender identity conflated with the fucking borg, thanks.
hansen probably had a gender identity before assimilation and while trauma identities are valid even if they're temporary this ain't it.
That's okay, you're not swarmgender, so you don't have to be represented by 7/9. This is why we have more than one nonbinary gender.
watch the episode unimatrix 0, and the borg collective as a unit doesn't have a gender identity at all so you should probably not misgender 7 or the collective like that.
I couldn't watch that episode because my 7/9 headmate was too upset by all the misgendering. It would have been too upsetting for us to force ourselves through that.
There's another person in my head and its identity is based on the character Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager. It couldn't watch the episode Unimatrix 0 because of all the she/hers directed at its source in the episode. I couldn't watch it either because I'm sharing my head.
People love to hate on Picard but in Season Two
spoiler
There is a Borg collective from an alternate timeline where the Queen fuses with one of the main characters and together they create a collective based on consent and approval from people who wish to be assimilated.
maybe it wouldn't be traumatic then, but hivemind status is orthogonal to gender and contingent on the type of hivemind. outside of unimatrix zero, which is arguably not "the borg". and the character of the borg queen who probably doesn't have a human concept of gender, the borg don't seem to have gender at all
hivemind status is orthogonal to gender
That's an exclusionary thing to say with a swarmgender not-person in the room.
I'm OP. You fuck off, and maybe make it clear whether you think my gender is valid first.
mammal hiveminds in fiction run the gamut from individuals who are constantly connected telepathically yet retain recognizable individuality to groups where the individual is only a meat robot. the gender identity of the "members" of any given hivemind is different in each depiction, each fictional universe's rules.
you're perfectly welcome to identify with a concept of gender that is impossible to explain to others but you aren't the sole arbiter of what hiveminds are or what writers decide about the genders of members of hiveminds.
and for completeness, multiple personalities in one mind is also not usually what anyone means when we say "hive mind" but even if we do for the sake of avoiding a tangent i don't care about, the gender identities of people in that situation are varied as well.
yeah that's how it goes when terms are poorly defined, concepts are as abstract as possible, and someone makes absurd claims about the interiority of fictional characters created and written by distant third parties.
There is no academic literature, because the culture responsible for producing academic literature ever since the Enlightenment has historically been transphobic, and only took gender dysphoria out of the DSM in 2013. You think there's a book out there explaining every single nonbinary gender identity? No, there are thousands of nonbinary gender identities. What field of academia do you even want to hear from? Biology? We're a gender, not a sex. History? We don't have any, there aren't enough of us. Physics? Math? Not relevant. Anthropology? There aren't any established populations of us because we're born at random at a very low frequency within a transphobic society. Psychiatry? Being swarmgender isn't an illness.
Well, I had to figure out my gender all on my own. It took years, after I had already become an expert on queer theory. But here, this might help:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_fusion
The entire point of the Borg is that they're what the federation would be without the prime directive and a value placed on consent. If the Borg asked nicely, they'd be the Federation.
The Federation initially rejected Seven's attempt to officially join because of their Borg implants
I've never heard of that, source? It sounds like you might be misremembering "you can't become a starfleet officer based on information you downloaded from the internet, you have to actually go to class".
Also, the Prime Directive is sus. "Oh, you can only access post-scarcity once you achieve warp travel." What the fuck?
Warp drives and replicators are not a prerequisite to post-scarcity, nor are they a solution to scarcity. As we all know on this site, capitalism manufactures scarcity. Earth became post scarcity when it transitioned to communism, not when it invented the replicator or the warp drive. If you are talking about giving post-scarcity to primitive planets, then what you are talking about is invading their planet, dismantling their government, and setting up a socialist state. That's what the Borg do. If you want to discuss whether the Federation ought to move over to the Borg way of doing things, then I'm happy to have that conversation.
Capitalism didn't bring scarcity into being and communism won't end it. It might be better at distributing resources equitably and preserving them longer, but the physical reality of the universe is that there's e.g. only so much grain you can get out of the ground every year and so many years at a certain level of production that the soil can sustain, so much land to be cleared for agriculture etc. The Earth is functionally a closed system and as much as communism might allow for technology enabling its matter to remain in a state useful for human social reproduction for far longer than under a capitalist mode of production, there's no solution to physical phenomena being fundamentally irreversible reactions. Even if we were to expand the reach of our species to the stars, that's still just kicking the can really far down the road.
Picard Season 2 established that Starfleet (not the Federation, oops) rejected Seven specifically because of the implants
Oof. That sucks.
and I don't believe there's a sound reason to force people to go through the misery of historical development by themselves
Because if you let capitalist species climate change themselves back into the stone age then you limit the number of fascist empires running around in space making problems for everyone else. Gene Roddenberry was a big believer in the idea that a closed minded people does not deserve to go into space and meet the diversity that is out there. Honestly, I wouldn't want the humans of the real world going into space either. They'd fuck everything up. Aliens, if you're spying on us right now: please go away. We're not ready to meet you.
Something just feels gross to me about that kind of manifest destiny thinking. Starfleet's reasoning on the subject is that if you don't allow cultures to develop independently, you end up with less diversity, which can have terrible consequences down the line if the One Way your civilisation does things can't cope with a novel situation. We actually have that going on on Earth. Every country is pressured to do things the capitalist way, and that's why none of them is taking appropriate action on the climate crisis. There aren't any countries left that have novel solutions to offer. In Australia, the white people took over the running of things from the indigenous by force and it didn't go well. They suck at it.
Seven discovering her humanity was definitely not handled with any kind of nuance or respect for her Borg identity. It was definitely initially forced upon her. Even then she kept a lot of her Borg such as her will to be efficient and attain perfection. It's a shame Picard underused her and didn't expand on her character properly.
Have you ever heard of N'aton? They are the future collective consciousness of humanity. The magian Nema talks about them in some of her books. Sounds right up your street. In the future all humans have a dual consciousness the collective consciousness and our own individual consciousness. The Collective is know as N'aton. You reminded me of them. I know you like magick.
Well because every human will be able to access the collective consciousness of N'aton at will. Now we have a collective unconsciousness that most people are unaware of.
Oh, so it's about teaching the neurotypicals magic? I'm not sure that's a good thing, neurotypicals are already dangerous enough. Sure, there are some forms of magic that can only be used with a progressive mind, but there's also magic that's easy to turn hateful.
Well there is a reason they are in the far future. Humanity has a lot of evolving to do before it is ready for such things to be available to everyone.
Seven of Nine (the character, not Jeri Ryan) destroyed what little tentative internal consistency Voyager had. She was the worst thing to happen to the show.
Meanwhile Jeri Ryan, the actor, destroyed America's tradition of only electing white presidents
libs on hexbear expressing tolerance or at the very least not actively attacking people who have a different conception of identity than themselves challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
