I’ve been joking around on twitter for ages about how akin to a religion Star Trek and its subsequent fan base are. Trekkies feeling more like my fellow congregants rather than my comrades in fandom. There’s something about Trek that sets it apart from other media projects. Something that makes it feel mystical, spiritual, and truly otherworldly. I want to use this space to explore, from any different angle that tickles my fancy, just why that is.

I suppose I’ll start, like any good convert, with my own testimonial. I grew up on the outskirts of the Way of the Warpcore, as it was. My mom had a passing interest in all things Trek, having grown up watching both The Original Series and eventually The Next Generation as well. She was (and still is) a Trek fan but never a Trekkie, the difference being, of course, just how religious one wants to be with their interest. My mom has very much always been a casual congregant. A true layman. Nonetheless, she made sure to watch Voyager every week as it was coming out and while neither my sister nor father had any interest whatsoever, most weeks I’d join her on the couch. I was into anything and everything with aliens in it at the time, having just completed a hyperfixation on the planet Jupiter and now obsessed with the idea of aliens from space, UFO’s and abduction stories. All totally normal things for girls my age to be unwaveringly into, as you can no doubt imagine. So, as a very strange, quite obsessive, unsurprisingly lonely child around her same age, I latched onto Naomi Wildman. I imagined what it would be like to be her: a young alien girl on a starship in space where everyone could clearly see her alienness, knew it for what it was, and loved her and valued her because of it.

At some point, Voyager‘s run finished and the ship made it back to Earth and all of this tremendous odyssey became but a blip on my radar. I remember watching episodes of The Next Generation here and there and at times would check out one of the Trek novels from the library. But mostly that was all I knew of it and found the books not as engaging as an Animorphs novel or anything written by Bruce Coville. Trek was in my life but it was little more than a background radio signal, faint and ignorable.

I was in high school when Star Trek 2009 came out. I saw it in theaters and found it interesting enough, but it just so happened to come out right when I was in the middle of a sizable special interest obsession with Harry Potter so since it didn’t feature Draco Malfoy or Hogwarts, my brain barely spared it a thought. Me and whatever it is in Trek that latches upon one’s brain stem passed like ships in the night, so close and yet so far.

This will-they-won’t-they dance between Trek and I finally came to a head in 2011. The year I graduated high school. The year I was into BBC Sherlock (I know, I know: first Harry Potter and now this? I was truly a child of my time) and therefore Benedict Cumberbatch. The year Into Darkness came out. Did I originally see it because of Cumberbatch? Yes. But I left that theater a completely different person. The timing had been just right in 2011. While I was into Sherlock and a handful of other fan favorites, none of them were at special interest level, which meant nothing was distracting me while I watched ID. As a person of the tistic persuasion who is very much dependent on routines, high school graduation was a particularly difficult time of my life wherein I was suddenly rudderless and terrified of the great big lack of structure that was closing in on me from all sides. Trek showed up then as a beacon of hope, an anchor I could hold on to. Seeing ID was like a type of baptism for me and from there I was hooked.

I left that theater fully hyperfocused on Spock, and on his relationship to Kirk. I watched 2009 again and got it in a way that had alluded me the first time. The scales had fallen off of my eyes and now all I wanted to think about was Spock and Kirk and all of their friends on the Enterprise. This desire meant that I quickly moved on from the AOS movies to watching TOS. While AOS had been a baptism, watching TOS was like the rite of confirmation. I devoured every episode. I quickly watched all three seasons, then all of The Animated Series and from there, all six of the TOS films. I was rabid and insatiable. At some point during all this I went to college. At some point during all of that, I also entered more fully into one of the deepest depressions of my life. Star Trek was the one thing I could count on as a source of joy.

Eventually I ran out of TOS and began TNG. While still good, it didn’t grip me with the same force as TOS and after a few years of Trek fixation, it started to abate and I became free to pursue other interests and obsessions. It took me years to finish watching all of TNG and near the middle, my wife and I started watching it together. We moved on to VOY which also took a long time for us to finish. We’re slowly working our way thorough Deep Space Nine now, savoring it like we’ve done these other series. But it was the arrival of Strange New Worlds that kick-started the obsession in me again. It was that show that made me pick up Spock like a well loved but discarded toy, dust him off, and place him once more on the little altar in my mind.

And now we’re here. I’m a little over ten years older than I was the first time, and hopefully ten years wiser. I’m in a unique position of being able to see some of the fanworks and posts I made during that first bout of Trek-induced insanity and compare them with the fics and posts that I’m making now, and I can see the way my mind has grown and blossomed and matured just by doing so. I can see the shift in what aspects of the source material I’m into. I can even see a transformation in the depth of my understanding of the characters and the universe they inhabit. I think this is a fun and interesting place to find oneself in and I enjoy this non-linear formation of my Trekkie identity. Makes me feel like something of a wanderer, striking out for parts unknown but always being drawn back home when the time is right.

The timing was indeed just right, seeing as the advent of SNW and therefore the rekindling of that dilithium spark inside me, coincided with another large upheaval in my life: namely the emotional turmoil of a medical detransition and realization of my own autism. As I was left unmoored in the soup of fluctuating estrogen that my body had become when I’d stopped taking T, I found solace in the chaos of Spock’s pon farr. As I worked to rid myself of the shame of being weird and different I’d used in order to choke myself into some semblance of normalcy, I found solace in the found family that accepted Spock utterly, no matter how different he was. As I now struggled with what all of these things meant about my gender, I found solace in Spock’s obvious queerness. Again, Trek became an anchor when things in my life felt unstable.

Which brings us to now. I’m more secure in my gender, my autism, and my own skin than I can ever remember being before. And while I’d like to take credit for a lot of that growth, Star Trek was truly a guiding light in it that I can’t oversell. Some combination of the support of my darling wife, the spiritual guidance of my Gods, and the enlightening tool that is cannabis, mixed together with Spock’s firm grip over the contents of my skull to create the Weird Girl© you see here today. Unashamedly odd. Beautiful in her peculiarity. Me without the constant masking and policing of myself that had been my typical state up until this point. A being of optimism and joy and I have Trek to thank in large part for that.

I see Trekkie as a label one can add on top of other spiritual systems. Trek adds and compliments other beliefs, rather than overwhelms them. I compared it before on twitter to Unitarian Universalism, Druidry, or even witchcraft in general. In the same way that you can have a UU Pagan, an atheist Druid, or a Christian witch, one can be a Buddhist Trekkie or an agnostic Trekkie or a Jewish Trekkie. I’m personally a devotional polytheist first and foremost. Pagan or Heathen is my main religious label but I’m beginning to see Trekkie creep into that. My background in polytheism and witchcraft, along with my past as an ex-Catholic, colors how I see religion and therefore how I see the religious aspects of Star Trek. Keep that in mind if you’re wondering why my perspective may not mesh with the majority monotheistic opinion.

For me, I’m beginning to see that Star Trek and its fandom isn’t just like a religion. It is a religion. Saying this probably makes some people squeamish (with good reason, as the case may be) but I think its important to say nonetheless. It’s hard to conceive of the language one needs to describe one’s fascination and relationship with Trek without using the vocabulary of religion. So I’m choosing to lean in to it. I’m choosing to explore this strange, nebulous world between pop culture behemoth and cult where Trek is nestled, without shying away from the spiritual.

I’m sure this is going to be a haphazard exploration. A truly chaotic journey. Surak bless this mess. But if you’re interested in trying to peer in to see how the Church of Trek ticks, then keep those hailing frequencies open and buckle up.

Kar-i-far ✨