Thinking about what others say their robot bodies would look like and why I so strongly feel differently about mine.
Thinking this over, I don't know what this reads as. I'm just trying to reason why I feel so strongly on this, this isn't a criticism or commentary on anything larger than myself. I don't even know why I'm posting this, other than that this is my blog and I put what I want here - and that there's a chance someone can offer insight or relate to me.
It surprises me how when I imagine my ideal robot self, I'm willing to let a lot of details change or be up in the air - what organs if any I keep, what sensors and chassis, etc. - but the one constant is that I need a humanoid face and it needs to be covered with my brown human skin (or a synthetic that looks and feels like skin with a perfect color match). A bunch of ideal robot bodies I saw mention they want mechanical plate faces or no (humanoid) face at all, and that's more robotic. But for me, I need the skin I'm used to, for some reason.
It's not the color, darker metal won't do, it's the skin itself. I need my ideal body to still have that part of how i look. But my skin isn't even the part of my current body I most like - that's my hair and my eyes. But I'm willing to abandon those for a machine form (so long as the mechanical hair is still green and curled), and not my skin. I think that's a big part of why I'd like to be Banach-Tarski'd for gender reasons, there's the ability to self-dialogue and have simultaneous gender representations but also the whole point of the paradox (as I understand it, at least) is conservation of the outer layer, of the *skin*, through radical transformation.
I can't really articulate concisely why I feel like my skin color is important. It's not like I take pride in my physical skin, it's a fucking body organ (and there's enough fucking people out there too proud of their brown skin). It's got lots of problems in many ways but does its job of shielding my meat from infections. It's just there.
But like, it's the most obvious signifier of one way I've been Different in society for my whole life? My skin is a big part of how you tell what kind of person I am in this world, like it as not. I would never take pride in it, that would be terrible, yet it's not something I ever chose or could escape from in this current reality, so I need to be comfortable in being identified with it by everyone from strangers to the government. That's why I always choose avatars with my skin tone, because if this image or 3D model is gonna represent me then it should match me in a very visible way. I latch onto characters with brown skin despite not really caring about "representation" because when it comes to the representation of myself as an individual, I need them. I don't want people to ever treat me as a default in a society whose majority has never seen me as such because of how I look as a human.
But robots are defined in part by how we no longer identify with humanity. We don't need to be human, being in human bodies is dysphoric or unrelaxing (and this is true of me as well when I allow myself to really perceive what's in the mirror), it seems logical that giving up human culture is necessarily a part of that. Not to mention, we're Othered already as trans people (generally, but i could be wrong, i haven't done a count). Why bother with what the cis think anyway, this is about my gender and how I want to present and if I don't want to be like them I might as well have the mechanical plating all over. Fuck the existing cis-patriarchies and fuck the ethnic divides they abuse to their benefits.
But that feels wrong for me? I'm a racial minority in America, growing up I watched a dozen or more of my peers cast aside inherited cultures to fit in and be more American, and call themselves "Americans who just happen to be born to immigrant parents from Asia". (Which, in itself, indicates a level of privilege, since we *could* do that as middle class kids.) I'm loathe to do the same, because that feels less like aligning myself to the best cultural indicator and model of my gender, and more like willfully removing a significant part of my history and how I understand myself and how the world (for better and for worse) sees me and will continue to see me even if I decided to commit to a complete sex transition, breasts and neovagina and all.
That still doesn't feel like a complete defense to myself - race is a social construct, and one that should be deconstructed to benefit humanity at large. But it doesn't change how I grew up looking different and had to grow to be actually, truly fine with having a different look and heritage, and that informs my gender still. But heritage, while cute, isn't really important to understanding myself, and if who I am isn't tied to my ethnicity as strongly as my robot gender then why should it be relevant anymore. But it was a serious, critical consideration I had to figure out when I was questioning my gender, even if it's not one I have to confront every day. But I don't need to limit myself to being seen as I was in an ideal robot body. But, my parents built me to benefit them, and if they could have designed my skin when manufacturing me they would have chosen the skin color I have for that reason.
I feel like I once again need to stress this isn't a critique of anything - if anything, I'm definitely the weird, wrong one for identifying as a robot because it's how i understand myself best, but still needing my human skin because that's also how i understand myself. I guess I'm just trying to decide: can a robot inherit culture? *Should* a robot inherit culture? And if it did, how should it show it?
