You'd probably have to have seen the series -- Buck Henry's spoof of every science fiction franchise that existed at the time, from Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to Star Trek, to Space:1999, to Star Wars -- in order to get my reference. It may have been inspired by the gag in "The Trouble with Tribbles" where Korax calls the Enterprise a garbage scow, as Adam Quark is the captain of an actual spacegoing garbage scow.
In Quark, Thomerson played Gene/Jean, the ship's engineer, a "transmute," with "equal numbers of male and female chromosomes," who randomly shifted between stereotypically macho and stereotypically hyperfeminine personas. The entire series (all eight episodes) was released in 2008 on a single DVD, but has evidently gone out-of-print, and the street price has more than doubled.
Incidentally, to those who actually do remember the series, if the music sounds vaguely familiar, it ought to: it was by the same guy who would score Mork & Mindy a few years later. And aside from the obvious ST spoofs, there's a ST connection: Jerry Finnerman was the cinematographer for four episodes.