#rather than having to try and claw back rights they’ve taken away and altered laws for

[zeenovos]

This kind of makes me think of a short story I read (it’s a scifi one) in which there was a young person who’s experience of dysphoria was being in an organic body rather than a robot one, and a procedure had just been successfully done where a woman was transferred into a robot body. So naturally they also wanted this procedure. The story is supposed to be about finding acceptance of who you are and the trans experience but I spent a lot of it being horrified at how many ways that robot body could go wrong/be used to traumatize that person.

In the context of the story it’s all presumably fine and everyone has good intentions, but I lost sleep over the questions of ‘would they be able to get help easily if something in their body was malfunctioning or failing if there’s only one other person who’s gone through the procedure?’ and ‘what happens if the company providing what they need goes under and no one else knows how to do maintenance or repair?’ and ‘what if there are back door codes that will take away their autonomy?’

Now, in real life we don’t have things that drastic at present (though I felt a lot of anxiety around the idea of pacemakers just giving out as I had a friend years ago who had three faulty ones in the space of a year before they got one that wasn’t faulty), but we really do not spend nearly enough time thinking about how to protect and care for those who need technology in order to physically function. Corporations do NOT care about them outside of squeezing as much money from them as possible. Why wouldn’t they go further, into more atrocious waters, if they think no one cares or is protecting people with disabilities that rely on technology? What things will they suggest to gently ease people’s sense of what’s okay over there if no one is thinking about the things they say versus the things they do? What will they get away with if no one listens to or talks to those people with disabilities (or really, anyone with any kind of disability) in order to find out what’s actually happening for them and what they’re seeing in those messages?

You might think that I'm joking when I say that we need cyborg rights to be codified into law, but I honestly think that, given the pace of development of medical implants and the rights issues raised by having proprietary technologies becoming part of a human body, I think that this is absolutely essential for bodily autonomy, disability rights, and human rights more generally. This has already become an issue, and it will only become a larger issue moving forwards.