Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
I saw elsewhere - perhaps Twitter - a criticism of the #cyberpunk idea, reflected in Cyberpunk 2077, that the unaltered human body is somehow sacred, and that augmenting it is profane. The criticism noted that this was, at its core, transphobic.
The critic then turned the idea on its head into a trans-positive cyberpunk that eschewed "humanity" in favor of "essence". Maybe one person's essence is complete when they're born; maybe another's essence is lacking until they augment themselves.
There are other deep criticisms of a view of #cyberpunk that insists that unaltered bodies are the only true humanity, too. E.g.: authors with this view tend to conflate increasing augmentation with a decrease in emotion, as though expressive emotion were innately human–never mind autistic people, people with flat affects, etc.
But I like the idea that the criticism offers - that augmentation allows a person to uncover their true self, rather than being limited by the body they were born with.
@noelle There is a subtle nudge working here, too. The table-top RPGs based on Cyberpunk had a game-balance system to keep OEM humans from being horribly outclassed by the heavily after-marketed humans with gun-arms, radios in their heads, and super-speed.
These concerns shouldn't be roped into the spec-fic nature of the genre.
