Dead or Alive. The band, I mean. Gender-bending Pete Burns, driving beats, eminently danceable tunes. Sometimes lumped into the array of 1980s one-hit-wonders, definitely part of the era's early alternative groups.
I owe this band my life.
Waking up one morning and turning on the radio and hearing "Brand New Lover" was the final push to get out of the longest relationship of my life, one that had, from the perspective of many years later, choked the life out of me. There were other factors - another woman, first on that list - and years later, a friend pointed out just how toxic and unequal things were. But I stuck with things way too long, until I just couldn't any more. And one fine morning, there's that song, and in that moment it was perfect.
Jesus. I remember Burns dying a few years ago. The Great Sage Wikipedia mentions his numerous and often severe changes in appearance; a Google image search reveals some serious plastic surgery. It's ... it's terrible. The '80s-era Burns was handsome, with the androgynous look that enjoyed early popularity in a time and subculture. Later years, though ... wow. He looked inhuman. Cartoonish, even. I'm all for body autonomy and an individual's right to look and be who they want, but what Burns did to himself flat killed him. Pulmonary embolisms and blood clots resulting from the constant surgeries. He died after a heart attack, probably the end result of being partially reassembled so damned often.
I wonder what Burns was looking for, if there was something he was trying to ultimately become. I've never felt any kind of gender dysphoria, but there have been times I would have readily been rebuilt into another chassis.
There's plenty of science fiction and fantasy out there - and no shortage of scholarly work - that takes a look at wholesale body-changing. Transhumanism. Cyberpunk. In their adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, Netflix is going all-in on the theme of a replaceable body - the lead character was played by a white man, Joel Kinnaman, in the first season, and the second season will see Anthony Mackie take over the role. If I remember correctly, at some point in the novels, the character, Takashi Kovacs, finds himself in a woman's body, and that would be a heck of a thing to put on the screen.
Depending on your take, Kinnaman's played a transhuman character already, taking on the role of Alex Murphy in the 2014 remake of RoboCop. More than being placed into a new human body or having a new one grown or even having consciousness moved or installed into a non-humanoid body, old-school bionics and cybernetics still are my mental go-tos when it comes to large-scale body modifications. A long time ago, I had dreams that sometime in my adult life, I would have my badly-nearsighted eyes replaced with mechanical improvements. Instead, I wear glasses and contacts, and reject getting Lasik surgery because the specs and contacts are such a part of my identity. Humans, man. We are not always anything like rational.
Driving home home from tonight's D&D game, I had a thought about how fucked up magical healing has to be in a conventional D&D-type fantasy world. So, magical healing from clerics and potions and whatnot are commonplace. Say some magic words, down some colorful fluid, and your injuries are gone. But outside of the numbers of hit points, that has to be traumatic as anything to the character and those around him. After a fight, he's got deep wounds, broken bones, burns from chemicals or acid or fire, and who knows what kind of other injuries. His partner says some words or he drinks a few ounces of something, and all of a sudden, he's watching things stitch back together, skin rebuild itself, punctured organs repair themselves ... you get it, right?
The gods of these worlds have to be either utterly monstrous or incredibly good at healing the mind, because that would cause some serious PTSD for starters. Also, at the prices listed for healing spells and potions, for-profit healthcare is utter bullshit, no matter what reality you exist in.
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