Chapter Text
Every decision makes ripples. They merge, rebound in sometimes unforeseeable ways. This is why they warn you not to meddle with shit when time travelling...
Before we look at the characters in depth, let's deal with the unavoidable speed bump for this exercise that is "Far Beyond The Stars". Nowhere is the sex of the characters (and thus the actors behind them) more important than in the historical racist 'real world' story of this episode. One white male editor. One white male artist. Three acceptable (male) writers: two white, one brown whose ethnicity is subsumed by his nationality. Two unacceptable: a black man, and a white woman performing under a genderless and thus presumably male pseudonym. One hustler, one athlete; both black men.
Fem!Sisko's roll as Bernice Russell, a woman writing under the name "Benny", becomes even more poignant as she faces the bigotry aimed at her for both her ethnicity AND her sex. Is she living alone or with her boyfriend Cassidy -- if so, would she have the same freedom to write as the original Benny or does she have to fit it in amidst tending to Cassidy's needs and wants? In the original take, Benny seeing himself as Sisko the man in charge of DS9 is just a given. But also given she and her fellow female writer are forced into a masculine pretence, would Benny just feel she had to write Sisko as a man to have even the slightest hope of having the story accepted?
At first glance it's likely problematic for fem!Odo to occupy a role that can easily be read as essentially an analogue to Rick Berman -- the homophobic misogynist power tripper who was Trek showrunner after The Great Bird snuffed it -- so she would likely end up swapping roles with Martok to become illustrator and he the editor (as the role was originally intended to be cast). However I can see her remaining editor, her position established as an indulgence from her faceless husband & publisher to act as his proxy -- in effect embodying the role of the show's head writers as intermediaries of Berman's dictates. This take on the character would make her defence of the decision to pulp the issue and fire Benny rather than publish all the more galling as she is defending her husband's repudiation of her own decision to hire a black writer in the first place (and perhaps more satisfyingly dovetails with Odo's service under the Cardassian occupation).
Swapping out either one of Bashir, O'Brien, or Quark for their female alternate doesn't really affect what are bit parts although inspired by real life authors, but it perhaps paints the editor as a slightly more sympathetic character given half his creative staff are not cis men (depending on whether Quark is openly female, an AFAB cross dresser or transmasc). In the case of fem!Bashir however, Kira's avatar would unlikely be married to any of the other characters in the unlikely assumption the gag based on Visitor & Siddig's off-screen relationship would survive that relationship's absence here.
The hustler exists only to die at the hand of the cops; male or female doesn't matter but I feel that fem!Jake's death would be somehow sexualised. Maybe appropriate, certainly distracting. You could have her cross-dressing as a young man as a street survival technique, or potentially expressing a queer identity which could as easily lead to her murder as it could be unrelated to it.
Fem!Worf could very well remain a baseball player while keeping to the hard fought sense of historical accuracy. By 1953, after the forced shuttering of the segregated female league that kept baseball going during WW2, three women were openly playing in the at-the-time presumptively all-male negro baseball league. Exactly who she flirts with in the diner when Benny and Cassie are there is your guess.
Next Chapter: Odo.