Let's Fly

Why the Egg Prime Directive matters

It’s been a pretty big surprise to me to see that a fair number of trans folks have been railing against the Egg Prime Directive lately, especially given that there are some really wild misunderstandings about what it even is, or what it means. Given the sheer nerdiness of the balance of the average trans person—and particularly those of us who are perhaps a little too terminally online—it seems kind of wild to me that dyed-in-the-blue Trek nerds, and even casual fans, can have such major misconceptions about an idea based off of one of the backbone concepts in one of the most famous sci fi universes out there. Still, that’s a fantasy world, and this is our lives; it makes sense that stuff gets lost in translation on its way over.

Personally, I think it was pretty inevitable that someone reached towards Star Trek for a trans metaphor of one kind or another, but I’m glad that the Prime Directive was the one that folks reached for. Of all of the many, many quips and in-jokes and references we use, I think the Egg Prime Directive is the best, truest, closest analogue to its original referent.

Let’s dig in a bit.

If you haven’t heard a formal definition of the Egg Prime Directive before, let’s lay it out on the page for you, drawn directly from The Gender Dysphoria Bible, which is where the term got Big Time attention for the first time:

My good friend Lily coined the phrase “Egg Prime Directive” to describe the fact that trans people have an unspoken agreement not to tell people who are questioning their gender whether or not they are trans.

Pay attention to that wording, because it’s really important. Under the Egg Prime Directive, we do not ever tell a questioning person whether or not they’re trans. Never. After they’ve come to their own conclusions? Sure, we can talk and laugh and commiserate as much as we want, but not then, not there.

It does not mean that we can’t talk about gender around questioning people, or people we think might be trans, which is what many critics take it to mean. Far from it! The Gender Dysphoria Bible itself immediately goes on to describe many experiences of dysphoria and transness that a questioning person might resonate with immediately after introducing the Egg Prime Directive.

But the thing is, this phrase comes from a source, and in that source, it has specific meaning. We get shown what happens when people follow it and break it, and we get deep explorations of why—all of which the Egg Prime Directive draws on very consciously. So, to understand the metaphor, we need to understand the source material.

To boldly go

The Prime Directive, in Star Trek, reads as follows:

Section 1:
Starfleet crew will obey the following with any civilization that has not achieved a commensurate level of technological and/or societal development as described in Appendix 1 [this describes access to warp-capable technology].

1. No identification of self or mission.

2. No interference with the social, cultural, or technological development of said planet.

3. No reference to space, other worlds, or advanced civilizations.

4. The exception to this is if said society has already been exposed to the concepts listed herein. However, in that instance, section 2 applies.

Section 2:
If said species has achieved the commensurate level of technological and/or societal development as described in Appendix 1, or has been exposed to the concepts listed in section 1, no Starfleet crew person will engage with said society or species without first gathering extensive information on the specific traditions, laws, and culture of that species civilization. Then Starfleet crew will obey the following.

1. If engaged with diplomatic relations with said culture, will stay within the confines of said culture's restrictions.

2. No interference with the social development of said planet

Okay, but what does all that mean?

In a nutshell, the Prime Directive is all about self-determination. It exists because when someone far more powerful, wealthy, and capable of making dramatic changes to the world than you or your society shows up, the scale of that difference is just about impossible to comprehend. It is, inherently, destabilizing and damaging, wiping out cultural difference and essentially forcing, through incentivization, you to act like the new arrivals. Even when that external cultural and technological force is removed, the damage remains—and gets worse.

And this isn’t speculation, either. It’s a very, very real effect. Entire Native religions, entire ways of life, were wiped out by the US war effort in World War 2, just to name a single instance. And before anyone sneers at these folks, there’s a pretty good argument that that’s a lot of what’s going on right now in American politics. This all? It’s part of human social nature.

This gets explored frequently in the various Star Trek shows—so frequently that “breaking the Prime Directive” becomes a bit of a joke to fans sometimes. But the point, as gets repeatedly reinforced, is that Starfleet is ethically obligated to make every effort to protect these peoples’ right to grow, develop, evolve, and become, according to their own cultural desires, needs, and traditions. The damage that those exceptions to the Prime Directive cause—for instance, in the last season of Discovery, when an undercover mission to save a people from total extinction go awry and the captain’s identity is revealed—is both far less than non-intervention would’ve resulted in and every effort is made both before and after the breach to reduce or eliminate the cultural damage that gets caused.

In every case, both when the Prime Directive is followed and when it’s not, the good of the people at large who would be affected by it are the first consideration. Picking and choosing on a person-by-person basis isn’t really an option here, because even if this person or that person could handle Starfleet’s existence, the typical person, and the typical society, would be hugely harmed by it. And, just as importantly, it’s done with great care; an expectation of no damage can be frustrated, or a grimly-necessary revelation of Starfleet’s presence can have surprisingly few repercussions.

They need to be enormously careful, because they can’t know the consequences of their actions until they’ve already taken them. Sometimes a violation works out in everybody’s favor. Most often, it’s ruinous.

The counterarguments

The arguments that most of the people who rail against the Egg Prime Directive generally boil down into one of a few categories:

1. Misunderstanding what the EPD means, interpreting it to mean that no references to being trans or encouragement for a person to question their gender of any kind can ever be made.

   1. While this is almost always just a misunderstanding, sometimes people who don’t like the EPD for other reasons will make this argument as a strawman, bad-faith argument.

2. Some variation on “I would’ve been able to transition earlier if someone had just told me.”

3. Some variation on “Cis-centric society understands so little of the real complexities of gender that it’s ridiculous to expect people to figure it out on their own. We’re doing people a favor by telling them.”

I’m not going to spend any time on the first category there, because whether someone is taking the idea to a ludicrous extreme from a simple misunderstanding or bad faith, they’re not talking about the Egg Prime Directive. The moment someone starts distorting what a thing is in order to attack it, they’re operating in bad faith, and should be shut down with exactly as much respect as they’re showing you by arguing in bad faith:

Bad faith goes beyond straw men and red herring debate stylings because it’s not a rhetorical device. It’s a straight up attack on having the discussion.

The Egg Prime Directive means, simply, that “we must not directly tell someone whether or not we think they’re trans.” That’s it. Talking about your experiences, offering to help a questioning person, giving them resources? All perfectly appropriate—helpful, even!

The second group of objections is… well, heartbreaking. One of the hardest parts of coming to terms with a trans identity later in life is the shattering, despairing sense of lost time. The yearning for a childhood—the right childhood—that we never got. To grow up, fall in love, get married as who we are, not who people thought we were.

To live a full lifespan authentically, instead of the half-life most of us get to live.

It’s a pain I’ve struggled with myself in a couple of places, a pain I know intimately well. Even now, even today, knowing that my life has played out miraculously well, given all the ways it could, and should, have gone wrong, I find myself grieving for a girlhood, yearning for the struggles of navigating love as a young lesbian, no matter the impossible costs.

But the truth behind this is that it’s not a real objection. It’s not even a real argument. It’s grief. Trauma. Mourning for the life we were denied.

Even if we grant the basic argument in this group as true—that the person in question would’ve been able to accept and integrate the truth of their gender—our denial exists for a reason: to protect us, when the costs would be deadly. To hide from the tiger in our own homes, relentlessly hunting for prey as we desperately disguised who we were. Knowing and being able to act are two fundamentally different things—ask any trans person who realized their truth very young, and had to hide it from the world.

This, sadly, is the painful truth that those who make this type of argument all too rarely face: knowing, without being able to act, would’ve only made things worse for almost all of them. Either they’d have had to silently bury that truth all the same, or they would’ve acted on it… and found out exactly how fierce the tiger stalking the halls of their home really was.

I know people who this happened to.

I know people who I myself hurt by breaking the Egg Prime Directive, before I understood how important it was. I’ve seen the havoc that that knowledge, when it’s not safe for the person to know, has wreaked on their life.

How severe the self-harm they have to inflict upon themselves to stay safe is.

People realize that they’re trans when it’s safe enough to do so, and when they have enough knowledge about what it means to be trans. The grief/argument here only addresses one part of that reality, not the totality of it.

The final group of objections to the Egg Prime Directive is one I’m actually really sympathetic to, given what I do here gestures vaguely at the entirety of Stained Glass Woman. There’s an absolutely overwhelming amount of bullshit out there about what it means to be trans, so to say that there’s vast gulfs of misunderstanding about the reality of being trans is an… understatement, to say the least.

It’s literally Machiavellian, however, to respond to that reality by saying “well, we should go around deadass telling people they’re trans.” The real, human costs of doing so can be humongous, not only to trans people, but to cis bystanders too, who can all-too-easily get caught up in the crossfire.

Maybe one of the better examples of this is the comedian Cody Webb, who happened to make a joke about trans people that trans folks found just a little too funny. So, Tiktok being Tiktok, some folks responded… well, inappropriately. And to this day, Cody has to deal with their bullshit, though he’s pretty good at making some funny material out of it.

But I want you to pay attention to what’s going on with him for a minute, because it’s a virtually perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with telling people you think they’re trans. And, before I say another thing, I want to be crystal clear: I take Cody at his word. He says he’s cis, he’s cis, period.

Say Cody’s cis. A bunch of us have just made his life a hell of a lot harder for no good reason. He’s spent money, done heavy, serious emotional labor that we demanded of him, for no reason. He wasn’t questioning his gender before The Joke. And of any group of people in the damn world, if anyone understands how shattering, terrifying, a gender crisis is? It’s trans folks.

If Cody is cis, a bunch of trans folks on TikTok are massive assholes.

But let’s say for an instant that Cody is, despite his vehement protests, somehow trans, and that what’s going on here is that he’s not ready to face the truth of his gender. How did he respond to a legion of transfeminine people telling him he was trans? By more and more adamantly insisting that he’s cis. By rejecting transness with ever-greater force.

By, if he’s somehow actually trans, retreating ever-more-deeply into the closet.

The Gender Dysphoria Bible speaks to this exact reality, and it’s one I want to stick with for a moment:

When someone is just told they are trans, that opens ground for denial; it activates defense mechanisms built by internalized transphobia, and it has a high probability of pushing them further into the closet, if not making them outright transphobic. Even when it doesn’t, it leaves ground for their own subconscious to reject their dysphoria, claiming that they were just manipulated or deceived.

Telling someone that they’re trans makes it likely that it will keep them closeted for longer. That it will push back the moment when they finally realize who they are, and be able to do something about it. That it will cost them more time, time they will come to grieve one day.

So, if Cody is, despite his adamant declarations, somehow actually trans?

Well, a bunch of trans folks on TikTok are massive assholes. Arguably, even bigger ones.

The weapon of the enemy

There’s a memetic panel from a fairly recent Batman comic, and it’s one I think about a lot in discussions about the Egg Prime Directive.

Copyright DC Comics. Used under Fair Use.

The ugly truth that those who fight against the Egg Prime Directive have never, in my experience, squarely acknowledged is probably the most simple one: telling people that they’re trans is assigning genders to people.

It is the exact same act that assigned each of us the wrong gender.

There is no difference. None.

When we tell people that they’re trans, we are—to paraphrase the luminous Audre Lourde—using the tools of the master in an attempt to tear down his house. It cannot succeed. All that will happen if we try is that we replace who the master is, leaving the same old harms in place. Forever.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time.

One of the hard parts about talking to white people, in particular, who came to their queerness later in life is that they have not done the hard work of taking apart the structures of supremacy culture within themselves—to be clear, it’s work I’m still doing, and mess up on from time to time—and this one’s a whopper. They’re used to being able to act with impunity, not really thinking about the range of consequences their actions will have, because when you’re apparently-white and apparently-cis and apparently-straight, there’s a built-in insulation from the consequences of your actions.

It’s a huge reason why the trans community has such a serious racism problem. Folks need to do the work, and because part of the work is coming to terms with how much, and how seriously, they’ve hurt other people? They don’t.

Supremacy culture all boils down the the power, and the ability, the imagined right, to wield power with impunity, insulated from the consequences of your actions.

In reality, no matter what your goals are—trans liberation, in our case—the means we use to achieve them matter. I want to be free. I also don’t want to live in a world where we, the trans community, rise from our oppression only to inflict the same grievous harm on everyone around us that was inflicted on us. The one and only person who can know a person’s gender, and whether they’re trans or cis, is that person.

Period.

Assigning gender is the tool of our enemy. It is supremacy culture, distilled to a single razor-sharp point of gendered violence.

We do not need it.

We must not use it.

And that’s why the Egg Prime Directive is not just important, it is an essential tool for our collective liberation.