This blog post is about the bouncer in the bar in Johnny Mnemonic and why it had to be transgender. The master blog post on Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson is here.

The Plot So Far

Johnny Mnemonic is carrying an Addidas bag with a shotgun into as he heads to a meeting. He stops to look at his face in a mirror and admires his new face. He walks into the bar, called the Drome, where the Magnetic Dog Sisters are manning the door.

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That’s it. That’s all we know when Johnny gets to the bar. We don’t even know that he is a data courier and has a cyber implant in his brain that is carrying hundreds of megabytes of data in his head.

The border around the body and gender has been broken down

Johnny has the cyber enhancement in his head, but he’s not the only one. Cyber enhancements are very common although not universal in this world.

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Gibson describes the scene in the bar: “The Drome stank of biz, a metallic tang of nervous tension. Muscle-boys scattered through the crowd were flexing stock parts at one another and trying on thin, cold grins.”

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The cyber enhancements reflect a society that knows no border. When the border around the body has been broken down what border is left? So it should absolutely come as no surprise the border around gender has also been destroyed. In fact, if there wasn’t a trans character it would be strange and false.

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A good liberal looks at this and applauds William Gibson for having the foresight to predict a future where Trans are included. But the good liberal is an idiot. Cyberpunk isn’t about predicting the future. Cyberpunk is a warning. The Trans aren’t to be celebrated. Whoever was reading this in Omni magazine in 1981 would instinctively know how laughably absurd transgenderism is. The point Gibson was making was that once deregulation comes for a society even things as basic and fundamental as the idea of male and female get washed away.

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Let me quote the text: “The Magnetic Dog sisters were on the door that night, and I didn’t relish trying to get out past them if things didn’t work out. They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.”

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The line about all the cosmetic surgery is interesting. They look exactly alike, except one is black and one is white, so that must have been a metric fuck ton of plastic surgery. Pay attention to the other detail, about how tall they are. They are 2 meters tall, which is about 6’6”. That’s a massive stature for two “sisters.”

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Reading between the lines it seems the sisters had their height lengthened. Doing so would make them more imposing and more likely to get a job as a bouncer. It seems to me that they got their enhancements for economic reasons just like Johnny.

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They are so imposing Johnny is afraid that if things go south in the bar and he has to leave in a hurry the bouncers are going to be a problem. Things do go south in the bar but Johnny easily walks by the bouncers.

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I find it quite delicious that Gibson uses the trans characters – characters who celebrate the gender border being broken down – to guard the border of the bar. That’s what a bouncer does. A bouncer defends the border between the inside of the bar and the outside of the bar.

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But as Johnny just walks through it, it’s clear that this border has also been broken down just like the Magnetic Dog Sisters have broken down the gender border. This criticism of transgenderism is one the things that makes Johnny Mnemonic Black Flag Literature and worth reading 40 years later.

I also wrote a cyberpunk story that employs a trans character in a similar way. It’s called THE LAST BLONDE and you can find it at www.blackflagliterature.com