Thank you very much for all that feedback. I've got a burlesque show tomorrow so I may not respond to every point.
Most of this, I think, is fair criticism, and I want to point out that this is NOT an attempt to write a Mary Sue--aside from this forum I'm not interested in publishing it--as much as an exercise for developing my character's background, which is not unusual in roleplay and as far as I'm concerned has its place in MMORPGs as much as any other RPG. Also, I'm not fully satisfied with the hand-waving that explains why trans folk are invisible in the Star Trek world, and was trying to come up with a way to explain this to my own satisfaction.
Of course I agree that Roddenberry had envisioned an egalitarian world, but I think it's rather presumptuous to think that the entirety of Federation space is equally egalitarian, without exception. It's an ideal--one pursued as far as practical, but an ideal nonetheless. It really isn't a stretch to presume that, say, earth has resolved its issues with trans folk, but other Federation worlds may not have.
And I'm not particularly convinced that Betazoids are automatically more enlightened, or that they're without their bigotries--especially when Deanna Troi's own grandfather thought poorly of races that relied on speech and insisted provincially upon communicating telepathically. (See
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Deanna_Troi#Early_life_and_career for citation. It reminds me of one of my great-grandmothers, who only spoke Scots Gaelic. Oh, she UNDERSTOOD English just fine, but she refused to speak it.) So if the bio of a well-known canon Betazoid character suggests bias isn't unknown on Betazed, why insist that they can't also be biased against trans folk? Besides, how do we know that being transgender isn't more common among humans--my character being 1/4 human--than among the Betazoids? Maybe among them it's such a rare thing to be trans that they've always treated it aberrantly and severely. We don't know.
And we don't know because--as I was trying to point out before--transgender folk, at least among humans, are invisible in the Star Trek universe. It's far more likely to come up among non-human species, some of which aren't even Federation. It's not discussed at all, so we don't know what the situation regarding trans folk is, anywhere in the Federation. Again, egalitarian ideals are just ideals, and while race and nationality was quite visible in Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek, we LGBT folk aren't--and I dare say trans folk are even less visible. So who knows which species have some transgender behavior? In Star Trek, it's apparently all or nothing.
As for surgery--of course surgery exists. Surgeries to make Starfleet officers resemble other humanoid races as part of covert operations is a fairly routine thing. (See
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Cosmetic_surgery for a few dozen examples.) While surgery to replace organs is a thing of the past, it would seem that surgery still exists for other reasons. It's not a stretch to presume trans folk would undergo some sort of surgical modification if they needed it for their well-being.
You've got a point about 20th Century earth culture and the Star Trek obsession with it. I may as well point out that I name my ships after SF stories--the USS Nova Express, the USS Lilith's Brood, and the USS Lathe of Heaven. Classy names, methinks. At any rate, this is my attempt to explain that naming scheme and tie it into my character. But that's not just *my* obsession, to be fair. My take on the matter is that the 20th Century, culturally speaking, was a turning point. It ended with a devastating war that threatened to pull humanity into a new dark ages, and therefore it was the default starting point for the renaissance that followed World War III, just as Greco-Roman culture was the default starting point for the European Renaissance after Europe had plunged into its own dark age. Granted, it's a bit hand-wavy, but that's rather hard to avoid for any SF author working within the parameters of a world derived from what we, here and now, would recognize, and Roddenberry went there well before I did.
As for your final comment--that, I fully admit, was laziness on my part, because while I could've invented an Admiral to be my adviser, it seemed worthwhile to have one who was known to be close to the Betazed people--close enough to marry one, at any rate. And for all my research, I simply could not find out enough about Betazed culture and notable characters in its history to tie my character's family into that with conviction--I would have needed to invent a whole family tree for that to work. So for expediency's sake I made my character a somewhat distant relative of a canon character. (Mary) Sue me. :P ;)
And, to reiterate--this is ONLY for my character development, and also to address some issues with the lack of visibility of trans folk in the Star Trek universe, to my satisfaction. I wouldn't even count this as fanfic, personally.
