(spoilers for Citizen Sleeper)
What does the nonbinary utopia look like? What are the nonbinary futures we dream of? The central desire of the nonbinary identity is existence. What else could the nonbinary and transgender future be? We want nothing more than to exist, and to not be denied existence. Our futures are not near; we may not even see it in our lifetimes. It is a possible future, but an unsure one.
Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi video game about roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. It imagines many futures, but the one I am most drawn to is the nonbinary future. In Citizen Sleeper you are a sleeper, not named after what you are but what you aren't: a human. You were once human, but you were also never human. Sleepers are emulated minds, built to pay off the debt of the human they may have once been. In CS, you have escaped this fate. You live on the outskirts of capitalism (the space station Erlin's Eye, long abandoned by its corporate founders), working to free yourself from the corp hunting you down. You also work to free yourself from your own body, designed to rely on the drug "stabilizer". Your life is precarious. Your body was created to kill you.
To be nonbinary in CS is a liability to yourself. You did not choose it. You were created to be nonbinary. Your gender is a technological invention; it is both your software and hardware. Your gender is violent. It is a miracle that you exist, when other nonbinary characters across the cyborg-machine spectrum struggle to do so. Most of those characters exist only within the digital "data cloud" of Erlin's Eye; the only character that physically manifests is a goddamn vending machine. The body exists as a technology and a tool; it would be incorrect to say that Neovend is a vending machine, but rather that they are hiding in one. I have a hard time figuring out where the body-as-technology begins and where the body-as-gender/gender-as-technology ends. Perhaps the nonbinary future of Citizen Sleeper is one in which technology is gender; the gender of the ghost in the machine is the machine itself. For Neovend, we can distinguish between the ghost and the machine; we cannot do so with the sleeper, trapped in their body.
Stabilizer is your HRT; it keeps you and your gender alive. In CS1, you are never free from stabilizer, but you might dream of not needing it. It is the one thing keeping you going, cycle after cycle. I think there's something appealing about living in a mechanical body, having a body that actually matches your gender and a gender that matches a body, but the trans futures of CS are not so much different from the present. Though you are born as a machine and born as nonbinary, you are still called a name that is not entirely yours; you live in spite of those who created you; you do not know nor care about what became of the person you once were. You cannot help but feel that you are human, when your creators tell you that you are not. You were designed with a dysphoria for something you have lost, or something that is out of reach. You are an emulation, you are not genuine, you are unnatural, constructed, a pretender.
The trans nonbinary utopian desires of Citizen Sleeper are of an inscrutable existence. Near the end of the game, you gain a new, sustainable source of stabilizer: mushrooms. Your body, however rigid it may be, is still an organic technology, one that grows and survives not just in spite of but because of the precariousness of capitalism. In its ruins on the Eye, you learn how to keep yourself alive.
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