#amsha bashir

Head canon underlying assumption: The Federation is the land of Luxury Space Socialism. Medical care - including high quality therapy and support systems that last into adulthood - are available to every family on Earth. The Bashirs had no reason to worry their “slow” child faced anything worse than a lack of prestige.

The question I ponder most is, exactly how did the Bashirs get away with it and what, exactly, was so “slow” about Jules?

Diagnosis: The most “damning” description we get is that Jules couldn’t tell “a cat from a dog” or “a tree from a house.” According to my (limited) research, if that were literally true, it is not intellectual disability but a brain impairment (visual agnosia), commonly from injury or disease (not genetic). I’m discounting that interpretation as those facts imply a different story. And depending on the power of Future Medicine, would have Federation approved treatment.

If we reinterpret the reported symptoms as Jules, age 6, using the same word for cat/dog or tree/house, we are now in the realm of a language delay or other speech disorder. Much more plausible for an otherwise healthy but “slow” child. Jules understands a cat looks different from a dog but doesn’t like to talk/struggles with word retrieval/has concluded that birds live in trees which makes them houses.

If the Bashirs were regularly taking Julian to a doctor, his language delay would be flagged for treatment well before he was six. Checking on language milestones is part of basic pediatric care. Precisely because it’s a symptom with a variety of causes (including autism). More on this later.

In addition to the presumed language delay, we are told Jules was small for his age and a bit awkward compared to his peers. We are also told he repaired Kukulaka at age five, unsupervised. Sewing is a fine motor skill with a lot of steps; Jules might have lagged on his gross motor skills but otherwise is on track.

The other fact we can infer is that six year old Jules, regardless of his language delay, attended school with neurotypical children. He and his parents compare him to the development of other children in his class, implied to be “normal.” I’m going with the assumption that on Federation Earth, this means Jules was at least peer-adjacent in his ability to handle a classroom setting, even if he had a different lesson plan.

A moment on Federation luxury space socialism and child welfare: we have zero information on what child protective services look like on Federation Earth. In the current USA, parents can have a lot of leeway in how they treat their kids - including access to medical support or education. I’d like to think the Federation puts the rights of the child higher, which means the Bashirs would have had to, at some point, ducked the bureaucratic oversight meant to prevent them from doing what they did.

Underlining: Richard and Amsha Bashir took deliberate steps to prevent child welfare investigations into how they treated their son, as far as I’m concerned.

That avoidance started after they tried the system where Jules received an initial diagnosis (probably autism spectrum) and access to therapy well before age six. His therapist probably focused on alternative communication methods and/or language acquisition to start with additional supports planned. With some success - see Jules going to school.

Neither Richard nor Amsha liked what the professionals were telling them. Starting with: accept your child as he is and adjust expectations accordingly.

Unacceptable. Now’s the time to ignore Federation laws, including those pesky welfare workers asking after the family. Richard and Amsha take their son away from busybody Earth to people who promise to fix their son instead of insisting they need to fix their expectations. And if you are going to all that trouble, why stop at “fixing”?

So Jules becomes Julian. Fully verbal. No intellectual disability but intellectual superiority. Physically capable in almost superhuman ways.

He’s still autistic. But Richard and Amsha hide that diagnosis along with the augmentation. When Julian finds out the truth, they insist their actions “fixed” his autism. Only as an adult does Julian realize so many things he has struggled with are fully in line with what six year old Jules’ therapist wrote on his paperwork.

Dr. McCoy –Kirk’s best friend– does have a daughter (or at least in the AOS universe, I don’t think she was ever mentioned in TOS). It makes sense that he would have one, if you take into account his values, morals, and the way he was brought up (for all that we know.) Kirk, on the other hand, doesn’t value family as much, possibly because of his own experiences with his own family. 

Both his parents died when he was young**, so there’s not much that he knows about parenthood to begin with.

Home never really felt like home (or at least we can reach that conclusion through the little-to-no mention he makes of it.) He doesn’t seem to be missing anything pre-Academy. The only reason Kirk has a home to begin with is because Iowa specifically asked Roddenberry to be considered his official place of birth and he said yes.

He has a brother (TOS S1E29: Operation Annihilate!) that he doesn’t seem to be close with* (if his reaction to his death is anything to go by,) and a few nephews that he isn’t really seen interacting with at all.

And to top it all, when he was a 13-year-old child, he went through a very traumatic experience that forged his character and definitely influenced the man he is today: the massacre (and subsequent rebellion) on Tarsus IV at the hands of Kodos. (TOS S1E12: The Conscience of the King). I truly believe that this incident is what caused him to not allow himself to believe in no win scenarios and, eventually, cheat on the Kobayashi Maru test. (This is also why AOS Kirk’s reasoning bug me a little bit, but alas, it is what it is.)

What I’m coming to say with all this is that Kirk is not very family-oriented to begin with, canonically speaking. Plus, it has been stated that fulfillment (for him) comes in the way of exploring, learning, and traveling the stars. It's perfectly obvious that the traditional structure of partner and kids does not make a lot of sense for him.

On a different note, he is said to have been “a walking stack of books” back at the Academy (S1E1: Where no man has gone before.) This description makes the viewer regard him as someone who’s well-read, hard-working, studious and that took his education seriously. If you look just a little further, this also implies that, despite his present charm and current confidence, he wasn’t very popular back in his school days and probably spent most of his time sitting in a chair. (One doesn’t become the youngest Captain in Starfleet history without paying the price.) But in the end, it comes to mean that he was very work-oriented, even when he was younger.

(I will not be getting into Spirk, Mcspirk, Carol Marcus, or any other ship variations because this rambling is meant to be about their individual reasoning specifically, but I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter and I might just ramble about them in a different post).

DOCTOR BASHIR:

Regarding Bashir, he and Chief O'Brien have a conversation on the early seasons of DS9 (S2 E13: The Armageddon Game) in which Julian tells Miles that he can't see himself bringing a wife and kids into the life he's created for himself. He doesn't seem to be mourning that fact, rather saying that his duty and his position as a doctor/Starfleet Officer would be incompatible with a family and living at the station. 

He was more clumsy (insensitive without meaning to) and invoked the term ‘fair,’ which didn’t sit well with O’Brien: “Somehow, marriage just doesn’t seem fair to them.” (‘them’ being the metaphorical wife and kids.) O’Brien, as many who do fit into the family structure, insists that the pros weigh a lot heavier than the cons, and believes that Julian will change his mind once he finds someone he loves. “I’m sorry, Chief, I just feel that way.”

Miles and Keiko are willing to navigate the hardships that Julian considers unnecessary and make everything work out in the name of love. Trying, for them, is enough. For Julian it’s not, because he doesn’t see many pros to outweigh the cons, and ‘trying’ for Julian is a synonym of ‘lacking.'

And how could it not? He has been conditioned throughout his childhood to believe that anything less than perfect is just not worth it. That he is not worth it if he doesn’t perform better than everyone (which I’ll talk about in more depth below, but for now a summary is in order to continue). Because of this, he really believes, deep down, that the other person would just suffer through their relationship because Julian can’t split himself in two and still offer his 100% to everyone.

Thus, he doesn’t feel like it’s fair to put anyone (or himself) through that ‘negligence’, least of all a blameless child. It’s all or nothing. This is just one of my headcanons to justify Julian not wanting to have kids— or rather explain, because he doesn’t have to justify it to anyone. 

To add more to this idea, a similar thing happens to him with tennis (S3E18: Distant Voices.) His dream was playing professionally, but he ended up giving up on it because he couldn’t make himself play tennis and disappoint his parents by not reaching his full potential. His love for the game and his prospects weren’t enough. He wasn’t enough. And the burden of being capable of greatness but not being able to show it slowly crushed him. Another layer that is added after season 5 is that he could have been terrified of being discovered as an augment.

And the exact same situation repeats itself when he purposefully fails a question during a final exam, not being first in class at the academy because he couldn’t take the pressure. His life is a constant tug of war between the part of himself that tells him he is capable of everything (and owes everyone to try), and the part of himself that believes he’s useless and weak and needs to hide.

No wonder he has crippling anxiety. Every one of his actions and decisions is carefully crafted and the product of a meticulous review, be it for fear that he would be discovered as an augment, or because he couldn’t allow himself to fail or disappoint others. Fear of not being good enough, smart enough, hard-working enough, careful enough, has tainted every moment of his life. 

Also, when he talks about Delon Palis, the only girl he’d ever really loved (up until that point in the series, S2E13) and thought about marrying some day, I don’t recall him ever mentioning children. Sometimes (most times, I would dare to say) when male characters fantasize about a future with someone they love, they tend to talk about a white picket fence, a wife, and kids. Julian didn’t. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but because of the nature of the conversation, I choose to believe that he purposefully left it out.

All this happens early on in the series, and it’s kind of speculative, but by S5E16 (Doctor Bashir, I Presume) it is confirmed. When Miles tells him he’d make a good dad, he straight out replies that he has no interest in having kids. It is important to note that Julian does have qualities that could be attributed to good parents (he’s caring, loving, patient, in control of himself and his emotions, etc) so if he wanted to be a father, I’m sure he would be a good one. It is not the case.

And that’s where more speculation comes in. In light of the new revelations (that his DNA was genetically altered as a child without his consent,) a new side of Dr. Bashir is revealed. The self-loathing and the anxiety are given a whole new meaning, and all that we’ve learned in the past can be looked at from another point of view. 

Because of the resentment that he holds towards his parents and their actions, I offer another headcanon that coexists with the rest of the ideas in this essay(?):

He doesn't want to be a father because he knows how much a child can get hurt by one. 

Due to his parents’ mistakes, he’s learned that the worst pain a child can feel is caused by the people that were meant to protect and love them unconditionally. The feelings of inadequacy, the anxiety, the pain and anger, regret, resentment and the fear… everything negative that he’s carried into his adult life, and still affects him, is Richard and Amsha’s fault.

Objectively speaking, they are the ones that taught Julian (either directly or indirectly) that he was only worth a damn if he was smart and capable. They taught him that showing any sign of imperfection was shameful, that not measuring up was disgraceful. That being academically unsuccessful was humiliating.

And not only did they keep it from him, but they also disregarded his feelings time and time again. They never made an effort to understand why Julian feels so strongly against the DNA resequencing, why he changed his name and grieved the person he was and the person he could’ve been if only his parents had given him a chance to become him. 

For all he knows, The Bashirs killed their son and replaced him with a different version, a ‘better’ one with new memories, new dreams, and a whole new set of limitations. He is what he hates, the ‘better version’ that he can’t stand thinking of, that is illegal, and wrong, and the reason that poor, innocent Jules (a Jules that deserved to live) is gone.

Can’t you see?! Jules Bashir died in that hospital because you couldn’t live with the shame of having a son who didn’t measure up!”

He might be smart, but he’s not himself and he’s certainly not the son they were given. They never wanted him. Their love is conditional. And he came to fear them, going as far as to tell Richard he was not his father, but his architect. (All this without adding yet another layer of abuse, constantly telling him that he should be grateful)

So he knows what excruciating pain parents can put a child through if they’re not careful, simply because they are the kid’s parents. 

And he knows that he’s better than they are (that he would never do something like that) but still I headcanon him being absolutely terrified that he might someday fail to protect a kid. His reaction when he fails to help his patients only serves to further this idea.

There is also a component of unwillingness to pass on his DNA that could be taken into account. The man has been hating himself and scared of his existence for over 15 years… he considered himself a monster (barely human) for pretty much his whole life! He wouldn’t let any child believe such things about themselves because that’s inhuman, but that doesn’t mean he’d want a child to share his existence, to live with the fear and the alienation, the pressure and the pain, knowing that they will never be like the rest of their peers.

(That is, of course, if the alterations were passed down to the next generation, I have no idea how that would work, so I’m not even sure if I myself believe this second part of it.)

The whole plot of Doctor Bashir, I Presume, also makes you wonder whether or not Julian’s fear of doctors (DS9 S3E9: Equilibrium) originated on Adigeon Prime. We don’t really know what the procedures for his augmentations entailed, but it can’t have been only psychologically scarring.)

CONCLUSION:

On a different note, both Bashir and Kirk are shown to be very interested in romantic relationships. They have a lot of love to offer, easily interested in people, quick to emotion, but plenty of times their commitment to their work has stopped them from pursuing a romantic endeavour. Kirk is a lot less vocal about kids (at least that I know of, because I can’t recall any specific instance in which he even talks about it in TOS), but he is very similar to Bashir in that he can’t allow himself to slack off and not give his best to Starfleet. 

Additionally, they are both in charge of the wellbeing of a great number of people: Kirk as Captain of the Enterprise (and sometimes the inhabitants of the the planets they encounter,) and Bashir as the CMO of the whole station on Deep Space Nine (and whatever missions arise.) As such, their time is already spread thin and they devote all their time, care and attention to carrying out their duties. Having children would mean letting go of a part of themselves that they are not willing to lose.

They both have a deep devotion for life (necessary for their respective jobs), not only for the protection of it, but also for its creation. That is to say that, despite their personal choices, they are shown to actually like kids. In the few instances they have interacted with children throughout the series, they both have shown to be fond of them, caring, pleasant and nice. (To name one of each: TOS S3E4: And The Children Shall Lead; DS9 S2E5: Cardassians.) Thus, it is not simply a matter of ‘not knowing any better,’

Both of them have complicated family histories and have been victims of at least one very traumatic experience in their childhoods that, I believe, heavily influenced their lives from then on: especially because they made them focus on working towards their personal betterment and that of the society as a whole.

In conclusion (finally, I know!) there is a deleted scene in the first AOS movie (2009) that I feel encapsulates their way of thinking pretty well. In it, a holo-message of Shatner!Kirk tells Nimoy!Spock, rather eloquently:

For people like us, the journey itself… is home. 

The end.

*I am aware that Sam Kirk appears in Strange New Worlds and his relationship with his younger brother is explored in more detail, but we will only be using information from The Original Series and Roddenberry’s version of Jim.