Emma Before Dark

I’m bringing this up because I’ve seen some really weird criticisms lately that take the stance that if you make a robot that has no gender or sexuality, that’s somehow… bad? That a single sex alien race, or a trisexed alien race, or a hermaphroditic alien race, is somehow inherently insulting to trans people? And this take is fucking baffling to me! These are exactly the traits you would expect in robots and aliens! (This applies to robots that seem to act autistic, too; many common autism traits also happen to be traits that you might expect in artificial intelligences.)

I can see the logic. At some point, we noticed all the stories with human cis men and human cis women who were almost entirely heterosexual, and some robot who doesn’t have a gender and explains this to someone at some point, and some people went “woo, agender representation!” and then everyone had to be like “that’s not agender representation, it’s a robot.” Which is correct; the robot happens to be agender, but if none of the humans are then having all the robots be agender isn’t agender representation. So some people started thinking that the robot was the problem. The robot isn’t the problem. The robot is fine. The problem is the humans. The robot’s existence isn’t some insult to the agender community, or the nonbinary community, or the ace or aro or autistic communities, depending on what traits it was given. It’s not representation, but it’s not an insult.

“Oh, but making all the robots asexual is saying that being asexual makes someone a robot!” No. It doesn’t. Making none of the humans asexual and making them all confused by it and having them treat it like some big division is what says that. “Making aliens that don’t have genders gives the impression that genderless people – ” NO. IT DOESN’T. Making all the humans cis people who treat the absence of gender as a weird alien thing is what does that.

me when the things are scary:

Oh same! I feel like thats a common issue because its so. hard to explain and Aggressively, Queerly Confusing, and its a lot of work dealing with the questions and accusations of being transphobic. I think people assume amab transmascs/afab transfems all have a very shallow idea of what it means to be transmasc/transfem (and I'm sure some do), but ime everyone I've seen explain IDing that way is either intersex, has had their gender affected by marginalization, or has a very complex relationship with their agab and their gender and their transition (I'm the last two). people also might think its just "cis people trying to be special", but that's just. a very uncharitable way of reacting to someone's identity!