#Some anxiety) it's also that he fucks both men and women. In Andy's view Garak will fuck anything that can hold an interesting conversation

[bijoumikhawal]

While I was doing a directors commentary about Bite the Hand that Starves You in my head a bit ago and talking about Garak and gender I did have a specific uncovering of my subconscious motives in how Garak is perceived by other Cardassians

Obviously in Bite, Garak is intersex and he's not in canon, but in all versions of canon Garak is effeminate and ASIT hints at an underlying anxiety he has about being ambiguously gendered/sexed because it's not properly Cardassian. But this also has led to a specific read I have of Garak and Barkan and Palandine (and Garak with women in general) which may be culturally specific- so like, in the MENA, a not insignificant amount of the anxiety about transfeminine sexuality isn't about cis men "accidentally" fucking transfeminine people. It's about transfeminine people's access to cis women (whether through being accepted as women or as a third gender category), and sometimes specifically, cis women CHOOSING to fuck transfeminine people instead of cis men. There's an Egyptian folktale about this which is also about fear of Black sexuality called "the Black Crow and the White Cheese".

Basically what I hit on is that I think when Garak was younger (especially with Barkan) his sexual/gender ambiguity was an open route to manipulation, but as he got older and wary, Garak’s sexual and gender ambiguity is instead a source of anxiety for Cardassian men because it is appealing not only to them, but to women- specifically, their wives, often because of the emotional and social failings common among Cardassian military men.

The "weakness" perceived in Garak’s effeminacy is attractive to people who need emotional support- as is seen in his relationships to women in ASIT (Palandine, Remara, and the unnamed Cardassian woman who cried on his shoulder in his shop). Barkan even insults him by saying he was manipulating Palandine on purpose via her emotional needs (and the running theme of sentiment being connected to Garak’s effeminacy and to his mixed race and Hebitian identity)