Babylon 5 Says Trans Rights

Picture, if you will, an intensely-repressed transgender woman. She’s twenty-two years old, four months sober, sporadically employed at best, and in general a raging pile of denial, depression, and dissociation. Her roommate starts showing her an old television show called Babylon 5, a cult classic space opera that ran from 1993-1999 on PTEN and, for its final season, TNT. She likes it: the special effects are dated, and the first season is mostly spent rigging the fireworks factory to go off later, but it’s got potential, as well as a cute lesbian romance they managed to sneak past the censors. They never kissed or anything, but they did work in an ‘I love you.’ Considering the show aired in the 1990s, it’s impressive they did that at all with two of their main characters without killing either of them off along the way (well, sort of. It’s complicated, but that’s a story for another day). 

And then something strange happens: the trans woman sees herself in one of the characters, and for once that doesn’t cause the trans woman to project all her self-loathing onto anything remotely similar to her. No, in this character she sees herself, and it makes her feel warm and fuzzy inside. 

In all honesty, I suspect Babylon 5 helped me come out. Granted, there were a lot of factors, most of them rooted in real life, but I genuinely believe it gave me a helpful nudge in the right direction. 

Babylon 5 was created by a pugnacious former theater critic named J. Michael Straczynski, or Strax, as I liked to call him, who would later assist the Wachowski sisters with Netflix’s emphatically pro-trans Sens8. Babylon 5 is about, essentially, the United Nations IN SPACE getting dragged into an interstellar war between the forces of order and chaos. Alongside humans are various alien races, such as the Mimbari, who are totally hairless, have visor-like bones around the outside of their heads, and can’t hold their liquor (relatable content).

The most prominent Mimbari is Ambassador Delenn, one of the show’s main characters, played by the late, great, incomparable Mira Furlan. At the end of the first season, Delenn enters a strange chrysalis, and when she emerges early in season two… She’s half human. She has hair, her bone-visor is noticeably less prominent, and she has several distinctly human internal organs. At which point I turned and made the joke to my roommate, ‘Oh God, Delenn is trans.’ He laughed, I laughed, and then we kept watching the episode. 

And then I turned out to be right. 

In one of the next episodes, Delenn is examined by the station’s doctor, Stephen Franklin, played by the late, great, incomparable (get used to me saying that) Richard Biggs, who specifically refers to Delenn’s change as her ‘transition.’ An episode or two after that, Delenn asks the station’s first officer, Susan Ivanova (played by the as-of-this-writing still alive Claudia Christian), for help with her newfound hair- in essence, she spends an episode getting girl lessons, and at the end she specifically mentions that she now has ‘cramps.’ At which point the subtlety went out the window as far as I was concerned. 

And then they kept going. Delenn is ostracized from her highly religious homeworld due to her transition, shamed for her new appearance and called an abomination. Delenn is harassed by humans who took umbrage with her new forms. Most poignantly, Delenn is interviewed by a human news anchor and asked if she feels any shame at ‘appropriating humanity’ without understanding their ‘unique suffering’, at which point Delenn breaks down sobbing, at which point I also broke down sobbing. 

And then they kept going. Delenn reclaimed her life, found love, found purpose. The show itself never condemns her: it emphasizes multiple times that she made the right choice. She’s happier now than she was before, better understanding herself, her friends, her lover, and her god. And it was immensely inspiring to me to watch her journey: her change was her choice, guided not by logic but by emotion. She did what she felt was right, both for herself and ultimately for others, and she came into herself in full through her transition.

As someone who spent a lot of time prior to coming out worried about losing herself, about becoming someone she didn’t recognize, that was immensely reassuring. Delenn did not sacrifice her heritage, her religion, her ideals, or her identity when she transitioned; she simply became who she was always meant to be. And she did all this while having great hair and wearing cute, flowy dresses, which for my purposes was also quite nice. 

Some of this arguably diminished by the fact that it was strictly subtext. I, however, respectfully disagree: that it was subtext arguably allowed them to handle it with a level of nuance and tact that many television shows today fail to achieve. Not to mention the fact that Strax has said on Twitter that if he were to cast the character today, he would cast a trans woman.

There is also the persistent rumor that the character was originally going to be written as male in the first season, only to emerge from the chrysalis as a woman in the second season; I don’t personally know if this is true, and if it is then why they decided to change it, but ultimately I’m happy with how the story played out: it was what I needed to see, when I needed to see it. The show managed to walk the very delicate line between impassioned thematic storytelling and blunt moralizing without ever crossing it. That it was from a television show that began in 1993, when the most exposure to transgender issues the average American had was Silence of the Lambs, is doubly impressive. 

As I said, there were a lot of factors that led to my finally coming out, but I’ll happily admit that Babylon 5 was one of them. Both the show itself and the character of Delenn taught me quite a bit about how to trust myself, listen to my own judgment, and simply do what feels right. It taught me how, in the words of a great woman, faith manages.