"Morphic Resonance" by Toby MacNutt
IDs: Physically Disabled, Queer, Nonbinary, Transgender
Author IDs: Nonbinary, Transgender, Physically Disabled, Queer
MacNutt’s story features Vasily, a queer disabled protagonist with government-controlled tech implants. The implants serve as adaptive tech for him, and help him be better able to physically move his body. He also has “resonators” that serve as care workers of sorts, helping him with getting dressed, preparing food, etc. After a chance encounter with a member of an underground “body liberation group,” Vasily finds himself dreaming of how to get involved. He thinks, “If there was a way to shapeshift yourself, even just a glamour, without going through the governmental demands and scrutiny involved in aesthetic licensure or authorised gender alteration, he wanted to know. He ached for it” (110). Vasily reaches out to the member to learn more about their work. The member, called Ammon, reprograms Vasily’s implants so that they are no longer under government control. Ammon also tells Vasily that there are a number of body liberation adaptations that their group can do. Vasily is astonished, thinking that “Certainly someone like him would never meet the criteria for sanctioned androgyny, or for any change like that; the mandate was mutually exclusive with adaptive licensure” (119). In Vasily’s world, much like our own, he is not eligible for both adaptive tech and gender-affirming tech. MacNutt pinpoints the difficult intersection that many trans disabled people face. For so many of us, we are not eligible for one kind of support if we receive another. It is also immensely difficult to navigate such a system, and requires way more time and energy than many trans disabled people have to give. MacNutt’s story does not use adaptive technology to explore the ways that disability or transness could be cured, but rather, how adaptive tech can encourage and allow alternate ways of embodying queer crip existence.