Who wants to hear about my transfem egg reading of Malcolm Reed?
Here are my main points:
- Nobody knows anything about him, not even his family. He seemingly has no life outside his job. He just… never seems happy. This could be a result of his identity being wrong, incomplete, a shell. He is insanely repressed.
- Poor relationship with his family. His father had certain expectations for him (going into the navy) that he was unable to live up to, and he has this deep-seated insecurity and need to prove himself as a result (the incident with Hayes)
- He cannot hold down a romantic relationship; he has had dozens of girlfriends, as seen in Shuttlepod One, and seems to have respected and cared for each one, but none of them worked out. In E2, his alternate universe self dies alone.
- He is seemingly always trying to prove his masculinity. He gets into a fight with Hayes because he perceives Hayes as undermining him, and whenever he flirts with alien women in front of men it seems incredibly forced (Two Days and Two Nights)
- He is implied to be passively suicidal. He constantly tries to sacrifice himself for the ship.
- He has a crush on T'Pol, who is semi-canonically trans herself. This is the only romantic attachment that he has lasting more than a single episode or throwaway line. Could be gender envy.
- In Shuttlepod One, he insists on shaving his face while trapped in a tiny metal pod with only one other person, which he explains as wanting to leave behind a presentable corpse. Could be gender dysphoria.
Put this all together, you have a miserable, suicidal man whose identity seems to be completely repressed to the point of almost nonexistence, who couldn’t live up to his father’s expectations and feels chronically inadequate in his masculinity, who cannot hold down a romantic relationship but has a long-term crush on a transgender woman, and who insists on shaving even when he thinks he’s going to die in the void of space and never be found.
That, to me, sounds like someone who is trying to be a man because they don’t think they are allowed to be anything else. Someone who grew up to become a family legacy, a Son, rather than a person. Someone who still measures their worth by how well they perform. Someone who, if they did a little soul-searching, might realize that she was never a man at all. Someone who might find joy for the first time in being a woman, not a Son, not an Agent, not an Officer. Just a woman. Estrogen would have saved her, thank you for reading.
